We live in exciting times. Digital Transformation (DX) is the integration of digital technology into all areas of the business. This is resulting in fundamental changes both to how businesses operate and how they deliver value to their customers. Organizations are looking to expand their market, and digital transformation is one of the key strategies they are utilizing to achieve growth as well as associated business objectives.

The digital transformation process requires an equivalent Security Transformation (SX). SX means transitioning to a new security architecture that can be applied ubiquitously in networks, computing infrastructure, information assets, users, and devices not formally capable of defending themselves. SX is achieved when an organization integrates security into all areas of digital technology. The resulting security architecture is integrated and automated, and provides continuous trust assessment to ensure that devices or workloads running on the network are not malicious.

The key concern for many corporate security executives is their company's expanding attack surface. In this era of digital business, change is the only constant. Devices change their connectivity in an instant. Users define new services and infrastructure at the speed of the cloud. And the business itself changes requirements in minutes, instead of months and years, in order to adapt to dynamic market changes. The attack surface isn't just larger; it has become more malleable and more complex. This new digital attack surface isn't easy to secure, especially because the very nature of its distributed elasticity means visibility to all or even most of it is severely limited using traditional technologies.

This is a major cybersecurity issue.

Lack of integration and automation hampers visibility, making life very complicated for IT and security departments. Most deployments today can be comprised of 30+ point products, most from different security vendors. These independent and often isolated solutions make integration and automation very difficult. Worse, each usually has its own security console, greatly increasing complexity for NOC and SOC personnel. Manually correlating data between consoles increases the time required to identify cyber threats and remediate them. And this challenge is compounded due to the added complexity of elastic hyperconnectivity, making it difficult to implement consistent, repeatable, and rapid responses to threats. And given the increasing sophistication of today's threats, modern defenses need repeatable, automated responses in the order of seconds or minutes to avoid propagation throughout the enterprise.

The Fortinet Security Fabric is 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. By combining next-generation detection and response systems, intelligent network segmentation, and single-pane-of-glass orchestration with AI and automation, the Security Fabric is able to see and respond to today's most sophisticated threats while dynamically adapting to evolving network architectures.

Security integration, automation, and collaboration are the only proven effective response to today's sophisticated threat landscape. A growing number of technology alliance partners actively integrate with the Fortinet Security Fabric via Fabric APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), and are able to actively collect and share threat and mitigation information to improve threat intelligence, enhance overall threat awareness, and broaden threat response from end to end. The Fabric enables the development and delivery of truly comprehensive, end-to-end security solutions that can dynamically adapt to the evolving network architecture as well as the changing threat landscape.

The Fortinet Fabric-Ready Partner Program is Fortinet's highest level of strategic technology partnership, and Alliance Partners in the program collaborate with Fortinet and leverage the Fortinet Fabric's APIs to develop validated, end-to-end security solutions. Customers benefit from the knowledge and confidence that their Fabric-Ready partner has worked with Fortinet to validate and deliver integrated security solutions ready for deployment. Customers also enjoy faster time-to-deployment of solutions and reduced technical support burden and costs due to solution pre-validation.

Along those lines, then, I have exciting news: at our Fortinet Accelerate 2018 industry event held in Las Vegas, we announced the inclusion of 11 new Fabric-Ready technology alliance partners! These strategic technology partnerships further expand the cooperative Security Fabric across the areas of multi-cloud, security incident management, SDN and virtualization, orchestration, and endpoint security.

Our new Fabric-Ready Program Partners include BackBox, CyberArk, CyGlass, Hughes Network Systems, IBM Security, McAfee, Micro Focus, NEC, Phantom, ServiceNow, and VMware. This means that, to date, Fortinet has brought together 42 leading companies as Fabric-Ready Program Partners, demonstrating the continued industry adoption of the Fortinet Security Fabric and the momentum of this program.

By opening the Security Fabric to partner ecosystems, we are accelerating our customers' transition to integrated security strategies, enabling them to address the full spectrum of challenges they face across the entire attack lifecycle. 

You can read the full news releases of everything we announced this week at Accelerate18 such as Fortinet's FortiOS 6.0 and FortiGuard AI in our newsroom.

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