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Fortinet acquires network security monitoring firm

Regina Pazvakavambwa
By Regina Pazvakavambwa, ITWeb portals journalist.
Johannesburg, 17 Jun 2016
The lack of a holistic, integrated view across the entire distributed network makes it difficult for enterprises to catch advanced threats, says Fortinet's Perry Hutton.
The lack of a holistic, integrated view across the entire distributed network makes it difficult for enterprises to catch advanced threats, says Fortinet's Perry Hutton.

Network security company Fortinet has acquired network security monitoring and analytics solutions provider AccelOps.

According to Fortinet the acquisition further extends Fortinet's recently introduced security fabric strategy by enhancing network security visibility, security data analytics and threat intelligence across multi-vendor solutions.

AccelOps will become FortiSIEM as part of the Fortinet security fabric solution. The acquisition is not subject to any waiting period and is described as being "complete and effective immediately".

"Fortinet and AccelOps share a common vision of providing holistic, actionable security intelligence across the entire IT infrastructure," says Partha Bhattacharya, founder and chief technology officer at AccelOps.

Bhattacharya says the synergies between AccelOps' solutions and Fortinet's security fabric vision and thought leadership will ensure that organisations are protected.

Security correlation and analytics results will feed directly into the security fabric allowing automated threat prevention, it adds.

This is significant because of what customers are facing today, says Perry Hutton, regional director for Africa at Fortinet.

As networks continue to expand beyond the perimeter, and embrace increasing numbers of devices and applications, the attack surface expands with it, he adds.

At the same time, the threat landscape is expanding and growing more sophisticated, and is targeting this new highly distributed network architecture, says Hutton.

In addition, mobility, IOT, virtualisation, and the cloud aren't only transforming businesses, they are game changers for security as well, he notes. For example, it is estimated that by 2020 over 25% of attacks on enterprises will involve IOT, adds Hutton.

Also, 60% of all security breaches result in stolen data starting within minutes of the breach and go undetected due to ineffective threat monitoring and security event correlation.

"The lack of a holistic, integrated view across the entire distributed network makes it difficult for enterprises to catch advanced threats that have been designed to evade traditional detection strategies.

"To address this challenge, organisations need to expand their visibility across this new extended attack surface. They need to be able to measure their attack surface end-to-end, and keep track of their security posture in a dynamically changing network."

Fortinet believes the acquisition of AccelOps will help mitigate these challenges by combining security and compliance monitoring with advanced analytics based on data from multi-vendor security solutions, enabling automated and actionable security intelligence from IOT.

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