Title: AWS re:Inforce 2024 - How Fortinet uses AWS services to deliver a secure cloud experience (SEC223-S)

Insights:

• Fortinet's Relationship with AWS: Fortinet collaborates with AWS in multiple capacities: as a customer, an ISV partner, and a service provider. This multifaceted relationship enhances their ability to deliver secure cloud experiences to their end customers.
• Fortinet's Global Reach: Fortinet serves over 600,000 customers globally, including 70% of the Fortune 100 companies, and accounts for 30% of all firewall shipments worldwide.
• AWS Services Utilization: Fortinet leverages AWS services to scale their go-to-market activities, R&D efforts, and SaaS delivery processes. AWS enables Fortinet to quickly iterate and deliver proof of concepts efficiently.
• Account Management and Security: Initially, Fortinet faced challenges with managing 5,500 AWS accounts. They consolidated these accounts using AWS's identity and access management tools, integrating with Active Directory and automating account creation and management processes.
• Automation and Security: Fortinet uses AWS security services like GuardDuty and Shield to filter out noise and automate threat responses, significantly reducing manual security efforts.
• Financial Management: By using AWS billing reports and data classification processes, Fortinet optimized their resource usage, reducing unnecessary costs and improving financial management.
• Marketplace and Channel Integration: Fortinet effectively uses AWS Marketplace to deploy services quickly and integrates their traditional channel partners into the cloud experience through private offers.
• SaaS Offerings: Fortinet has developed several SaaS offerings on AWS, including FortiGate Cloud Native Firewall and FortiWeb Cloud WAF, providing advanced security without infrastructure overhead for customers.
• Performance and Integration: Fortinet's solutions are highly integrated with AWS services, offering superior performance, especially in inline firewalling, and leveraging AWS's infrastructure for better security outcomes.
• Machine Learning in Security: Fortinet's web application firewall uses machine learning to improve threat detection and reduce false positives, transitioning from static to dynamic models for better security management.

Quotes:

• "We ourselves are a customer of AWS and we use a lot of those services."
• "We serve as 70% of the Fortune 100 companies, and we represent globally about 30% of all firewall shipments."
• "We were able to really start by leveraging some of the core services that AWS provides."
• "GuardDuty has been very good for us. We can take that threat, and what we have is an automated function where GuardDuty alerts are sent to the account owner."
• "We had tons of storage volumes that were unallocated. We had tons of public IPs that were unallocated. Hundreds of thousands of dollars of spend that we didn't need to spend."
• "The AWS Marketplace experience really enabled that. We can deploy listings in a very repeatable way."
• "Security, by and large, is an interest to be consumed as a SaaS service these days."
• "We are known as a company that provides very, very high-performance security, specifically inline firewall."
• "We actually provide rule sets that you can consume through a click-through on Marketplace to add additional threat intelligence to your AWS WAF deployment."
• "We're moving from a static model to a dynamic model that continually learns over time."