Fortinet Accelerate: Fortinet Debuts FortiOS 7.6

FORTINET ACCELERATE — Fortinet has unveiled the latest version of its FortiOS operating system, FortiOS 7.6, and other enhancements to the company’s cybersecurity platform, the Fortinet Security Fabric.

Fortinet Accelerate is taking place this week in Las Vegas. It has 4,000 attendees, including 2,300 partners.

Ken Xie, Fortinet's founder, chairman and CEO, said his company offers the best and sometimes the only solution for partners to meet their customers’ cybersecurity needs.

FortiOS 7.6 allows customers to better mitigate risk, reduce complexity and realize a “superior” user experience across their entire network, according to the company.

Fortinet's Ken Xie

“We founded Fortinet on the principle of fortifying our customers’ networks by converging networking into secure networking,” Xie said. “To achieve this, we’ve spent the past two decades focused on organically developing our solutions around one operating system and investing in FortiASIC, our specialized compute processors. Today, FortiOS is the world’s most powerful, real-time network security operating system capable of simplifying management across content, applications, users, devices, data and locations, and our proprietary FortiASICs deliver unprecedented performance, lower costs and reduced energy consumption. Our dedication to over 20 years of organic innovation uniquely enables 30-plus networking and security functions to work together, and we take great pride in enhancing the operating system that has already set the industry standard with the release of FortiOS 7.6.”

FortiOS 7.6 Features

FortiOS 7.6 includes new features spanning the following areas:

Additional updates to enhance the Fortinet Security Fabric include:

“We just want to fortify your network and to prevent you from seeing all these what we call the cyber barbarian attack from the cyber space from across the border,” Xie said. “So how to do that? By converging or replacing networking with network security because network security gives you the way to manage your content, the application, the data, the user and the device you can’t see on networking. And this market will grow much faster and will take over the networking market.”

Competitive Advantages for Partners

In addition, FortiOS and FortiASIC offer advantages compared to Fortinet’s competitors, providing a “much easier way to manage, with much better performance and much lower power consumption compared to any other solutions,” Xie said.

“That's also the reason in all the five areas, whether to replace or refresh the traditional firewall, whether you do the IoT and OT security, or you do the internal segmentation (ZTNA), or you do the unified SASE, which we believe will be the leader in the next few years, or the SecOps, which is AI-based, in all these five solutions, Fortinet is the best and sometimes the only solution for you to address this customer need,” he said.

Fortinet already has more than 50% market share of all the firewalls deployed globally, with more than 12 million Fortigate firewalls deployed, more than any other vendor, Xie said.

In addition, Fortinet SASE provides the best business opportunity for all partners and customers, he said.

SecureOps needs a lot of different product solutions and Fortinet’s products are mostly developed in house, Xie said.

“So we make it integrate and automate together on day one compared to other security providers; most of them all come from acquisition, which have a difficult time to integrate and automate together,” he said. “So that's where we have a huge advantage for SecureOps, whether you upsell or cross-sell, because all these products are well-integrated, well-automated together, which is a much better, efficient solution than other competitors.”