As organizations face the rapidly expanding digital attack surface, customers increasingly seek to achieve an integrated security approach. Various IT solutions working in isolation are not enough to address the critical gaps that contribute to increased security risks. Still, nearly two-thirds of enterprises in EMA's Network Management Megatrends 2020 report indicated they use between four and 10 network management tools.

Lack of integration and automation across products hinders visibility, making life very complicated for IT and security departments. Enterprise deployments can often be comprised of 30+ point products, mostly from different security vendors. These independent and often isolated systems may not share threat intelligence or take coordinated security policy actions to respond to fast-moving cyberthreats, resulting in greatly reduced overall security effectiveness.

The Fortinet Security Fabric has an architectural approach to security designed to connect traditionally disparate security solutions into a unified framework, allowing them to dynamically adapt to the evolving IT Infrastructure in order to defend its rapidly changing attack surface. Fortinet's Open Fabric Ecosystem allows participating partners from an array of industries to seamlessly integrate their solutions with the Security Fabric, thus extending the benefits of the Security Fabric through pre-validated and documented joint solutions with advanced security. The Fortinet Security Fabric enables organizations to achieve an integrated platform approach for complete visibility and comprehensive security without compromise across every network segment and device, and across hardware, virtual and cloud environments.

Fortinet's Open Fabric Ecosystem 

With over 400 technology integrations, Fortinet's Open Fabric Ecosystem is one of the largest cybersecurity ecosystems in the industry. The ecosystem is comprised of Fabric-Ready technology alliance partners, collaborations with threat sharing organizations and other technology integrations, delivering comprehensive end to end security. These ecosystem integrations enable threat intelligence sharing to detect, monitor, block, and remediate attacks across the entire attack surface, ensuring rapid and coordinated policy enforcement. The integration platform approach helps streamline and automate security, enabling customers to rapidly and effectively respond to today's most sophisticated threats. 

Fortinet's Fabric-Ready Partner Program, launched in 2016, plays a key role in the Open Fabric Ecosystem. The Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Program acts as the enabler and brings together the community of technology alliance partners to deliver powerful complementary solutions in the Open Fabric Ecosystem. Partners are provided with program infrastructure, resources, and tools to integrate with the Security Fabric, develop joint solutions, and become part of the ecosystem. Fortinet's open ecosystem approach extends the capabilities of the Security Fabric to the Fabric-Ready partner solutions and enables integration of new solutions into the Fabric.

Value to Customers

Customers benefit from the Open Fabric Ecosystem extension of the Fortinet Security Fabric through the following types of integrated ecosystem solutions:

• Fabric Connectors: Fortinet-developed deep integrations into technology partner platforms that automate operations, policies, and processes. 
• Fabric APIs: Partner-developed Fabric API integrations for a broad range of ecosystem solutions to secure the entire digital attack surface. 
• Fabric DevOps: Community-driven set of security automation and orchestration tools and scripts developed by Fortinet, partners, and customers.
• Extended Fabric Ecosystem: Threat intelligence sharing collaborations and other vendor technology integrations.

Customers can leverage a wide array of integrated ecosystem solutions to best fit and secure their infrastructure while preserving their existing security investments. Through threat intelligence sharing and coordinated policy enforcement across products, ecosystem solutions provide customers with effective security. Pre-validation of ecosystem solutions enables customers to make purchase decisions with more confidence and gain faster time to deployment with reduced systems integrations costs. Ecosystem solutions extend the benefits of the Security Fabric, and are a testament to the openness of the Security Fabric and the inclusive philosophy of the Fabric-Ready Partner Program. 

The Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Program

The Fabric-Ready Partner Program is Fortinet's technology alliance partner program, and serves as a key enabler of the Open Fabric Ecosystem. Partner inclusion in the program signals to customers and the industry at large that the partner has collaborated with Fortinet to develop integrated solutions. The Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Program provides partners with an edge by being allied with a rapidly growing and widely deployed market leader. Customers also benefit from the knowledge and confidence that the Fabric-Ready partner has worked with Fortinet to validate and deliver integrated solutions ready for deployment. Fabric-Ready alliance partners can tap into Fortinet's alliance program, technical integration, co-marketing, and training resources, further ensuring joint customer success. 

For more information on the Fabric-Ready Partner Program and how to become a Fabric-Ready partner, visit here.