Customer Perspectives

With the promise of enhanced resiliency, scalability, and agility, more organizations are choosing to migrate some, if not all, of their data and applications to the cloud. But with increased cloud adoption, comes new security risks. As critical workflows are moved to the cloud, organizations must implement security solutions that provide the necessary visibility and control across cloud infrastructures, enabling security as well as enhanced application and network performance from data center to cloud. Indeed, the success of any cloud initiative is now dependent on the ability to integrate security visibility and control across the LAN, WAN, and cloud edges.

The experience of a large telecommunications provider is the perfect example of how this can be achieved.

Finding the Right Vendor to Secure Azure

For telecommunications providers, it is critical to remain agile and keep pace with the evolving requirements of their customers while also ensuring security and business continuity. To accomplish this, one telecommunications provider serving millions of customers implemented an ongoing digital transformation strategy that aimed to improve operations and mobility while enhancing customer experience and reducing costs. The next step in this digital transformation journey was migrating its critical applications to Microsoft Azure.

For this provider, the public cloud-in this case, Microsoft Azure-offered efficient and agile services to support digital innovation initiatives, which involve big data, blockchain, and other collaborative projects. The provider also recognized that running workloads from its business support systems (BSS) applications in Azure would improve operational efficiencies.

Finding a vendor to secure its public cloud environment, however, was a surprisingly complex undertaking. The telecom provider found few security vendors that provided both the required cloud-native security capabilities and the tools to extend on-premises security management and policies to the cloud -and across clouds. 

Demonstrated Simplicity and Cloud-Native Integration

This is why this telecommunications provider looked to Fortinet. The company already leveraged FortiGate next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) to protect its on-premises network and was highly satisfied with them. In demonstrations of the Fortinet solution for Azure, the telecom provider's security team was able to see the simplicity with which they could extend their enterprise-level visibility and control into the Azure cloud and manage both the cloud and on-premises environments from a single console with FortiManager.

Moreover, Fortinet's comprehensive security blueprint for the public cloud charted a clear path forward that could be adapted to this organization's specific requirements. Finally, Fortinet was able to demonstrate deep integration between Azure Sentinal and Azure Security Center and Fortinet solutions -helping to ensure that their would be no gaps in security coverage.

An OPEX-Minimizing Solution

The Fortinet solution for Azure included FortiGate-VM with Unified Threat Management (UTM) and Advanced Threat Protection (ATP) features, as well as FortiWeb web application firewalls (WAFs), FortiManager Cloud and FortiAnalyzer Cloud. Available in the Azure Marketplace, FortiGate-VM enabled the telecom provider to achieve highly cost-optimized firewall sizing with on-demand scaling to support their evolving development projects and new applications. These automated, pay-as-you-go features are expected to help the company minimize the OPEX of providing continuous security coverage as its cloud footprint grows. At the same time, FortiWeb secures business-critical applications from known and Zero-Day vulnerabilities.

Further, as a company that had already committed to leveraging Big Data and other advanced analytics, the provider immediately recognized the value of having a logging and reporting tool such as FortiAnalyzer, with analytics integrated across their cloud and on-premises infrastructure. Automation features in FortiAnalyzer, such as APIs, scripts, connectors, and automation stitches will help the provider improve threat detection accuracy and accelerate response. Moreover, the company was able to utilize FortiCWP to ensure that their cloud deployments were compliant with SOX and GDPR requirements and that sensitive data wasn't left exposed in the cloud.

Migrating Confidently to Microsoft Azure 

Though other security vendors vied for the telecom providers' business, what helped to crystallize the value of Fortinet's Dynamic Cloud Security solutions was Fortinet's commitment to native integration, broad protection, and its management and automation capabilities.

Learn how Fortinet's dynamic cloud security solutions provide increased visibility and control across cloud infrastructures, enabling secure applications and connectivity from data center to cloud.