How Fortinet Technology "Zaps" Technical Debt: Part 1

Introduction 

The problem: I hope you've eaten already because this analogy might make you hungry. Suppose you own a high-demand burrito shop, so you hire several people for the assembly line, one for each item you could put on the burrito, such as meat, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, etc. Brilliant idea? Although well-intentioned, this strategy creates multiple challenges. In this post, we will focus on two of the challenges and finish up in the second.

The headache: Expenses skyrocket because you pay several people for a job that two or three employees can handle. Even worse, none of the employees are fulfilled, and it's a Hunger Games situation for those who get to do the "best" parts of the burrito assembly. 

Hiring several people to do several specialized overlapping tasks in our burrito shop is analogous to buying several point security tools within your security architecture; it creates multiple ongoing inefficiencies and challenges, two of which we will cover in this post:

Wasted resources 

Several people are on your payroll now doing similar tasks when the job could be done more efficiently with a fraction of the personnel. Similarly, in cybersecurity, maintaining multiple highly specialized tools that overlap drives up costs on duplicate licenses and infrastructure.

Operational chaos

The burrito "artists" stepping on each other's toes is like the operational complexity of managing multiple overlapping tools. Determining which tool does what and knowing which tool to use for each function can cause conflict and redundancy of action.

How the Fortinet security fabric solves these challenges

Wasted resources

Like employees with overlapping swim lanes, point products can create waste in many areas. In addition, when specialized tools are added, extra staff often has to be added (much like the burrito bunch tripping all over each other). The security fabric helps reduce it by centralizing management, orchestration, and threat intelligence and eliminating the need for individual products to solve specific needs. By integrating its new (FortiGate), endpoint protection (FortiEDR and FortiClient), malware protection (fortisandbox), and others into a unified platform, overlap and operational overhead are drastically reduced. 

Operational chaos

When employees have a specific role and understand their purpose, they are more efficient and work better with their fellow employees. Similarly, by integrating the various security tools under the umbrella of the Fortinet platform, each tool operates at maximum capability as its role is clearly defined and data is shared. In addition, there are no gaps in coverage, ensuring increased traffic visibility, which results in the ability to detect threats quicker and act on those threats faster. These integrations ensure: 

• Data flows smoothly between different security components.
• There are no gaps or overlaps in coverage, reducing the complexity of managing multiple, siloed tools.
• Shared intelligence across the security stack (powered by Fortiguard), improving overall threat detection and response.

Conclusion

Just like being overstaffed in a burrito shop causes many inefficiencies for a business, technical debt provides many challenges that have repercussions years later. In this post, we covered two challenges: wasted resources and operational chaos. The Fortinet security fabric is designed to provide tight integration with your security tools, providing succinct "swim lanes" for all your tools and helping to mitigate wasted resources. Additionally, the visibility across all tools ensures fewer gaps that attackers can exploit, and its superior, up-to-date threat intelligence powered by Fortiguard ensures your tools learn about attacks in near real-time, which leads to less operational chaos and fewer missed opportunities. In the next post, we will cover how Fortinet can mitigate missed opportunities and future maintenance challenges resulting from accumulated technical debt. Stay tuned!  For more information on integrating Fortinet into your environment, contact your WWT account executive.