Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, has announced enhanced AIOps capabilities across its entire networking portfolio, including the industry’s first artificial intelligence-based network operations management for 5G/LTE gateways.

When combined with the latest AIOps enhancements to Fortinet’s secure SD-WAN and wired/wireless LAN portfolio, network operations teams have access to even more dynamic insights and event correlation across their entire network, making FortiAIOps the most complete AIOps network management platform in the industry.

“Fortinet has spent the past decade maturing its AI and ML technology to analyse over 100 billion global security events a day covering all types of threats and attack techniques, which in turn informs over a billion daily security updates to Fortinet’s products. We’re continuing our commitment to AI innovation and automation by delivering AIOps capabilities across our robust portfolio of enterprise networking technology to help our customers proactively simplify Day 2 operations and improve uptime of the network. These latest enhancements are another significant step towards truly autonomous and self-healing networks that converge networking and security.” — John Maddison, executive vice president of products and chief marketing officer at Fortinet

Growing urgency for AI-enhanced network automation

With accelerated digital innovation and the continued growth in the hybrid workforce, the network has never been more critical for business success. NOC teams are becoming increasingly reliant on AI-based management tools like AIOps to maximise network visibility, improve the response time to anomalies and reduce ticket volume to remediate potential network issues.

Gartner goes one step further, saying: “As organisations continue to undertake digital transformation, IT operations no longer has the luxury of responding to issues after they occur. Instead, it must become proactive, get more involved in the entire value stream and, at a minimum, work to address potential issues before they impact user experience.”

FortiAIOps delivers better visibility and control across the network

Fortinet started its artificial intelligence and machine learning journey a decade ago, and today FortiGuard Labs can process over 100 billion security events per day, from more than six million devices, to provide actionable insights that help quickly identify zero-day threats and malware, reduce the number of false alarms, detect insider threats, and enable both automated and human cybersecurity responses.

FortiAIOps builds on this rich history in AI and ML to bring visibility to NOC teams by applying these principles to all layers of the network. Unlike many networking vendors, Fortinet uniquely converges networking and security across the LAN, wireless LAN and WAN, and ties everything together with a single operating system and management console. Fortinet takes this one step further by integrating not just security, but also AIOps across the entire network to allow organisations to gain actionable Day 2 network insights that proactively optimise networks. Specifically, FortiAIOps provides configuration recommendations for hardware and software, and offers simplified resolution to trouble tickets.

Fortinet has advanced its FortiAIOps capabilities in the following ways:

SD-WAN
Fortinet was named a leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN for the third consecutive year for Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, which now benefits from enhanced FortiAIOps capabilities, including the ability to track metrics such as interfaces, system resources and ISP bandwidth, as well as dynamically compute SLA baselines to ensure that the best performance is always achieved.

Wired/wireless LAN
From its inception, FortiAIOps has supported the Fortinet wired/wireless LAN portfolio, including FortiSwitch and FortiAP. This latest release enhances Fortinet’s existing wired/wireless LAN AIOps capabilities by improving its ability to provide NOC teams with real-time visibility of potential issues before network users are negatively impacted. Additional enhancements deliver configurable SLAs, allowing teams to customise and fine-tune their preferred network metrics to best represent their network health.

5G/LTE gateways
The addition of AIOps capabilities to support FortiExtender 5G/LTE gateways makes Fortinet the only vendor providing AIOps on a 5G/LTE link. This critical evolution of AIOps expands visibility for NOC teams and allows analysis of data down to the WAN link level, not just at the SD-WAN abstraction level. This helps IT teams better diagnose issues and ensure resiliency.

Analyst validation

“Fortinet is delivering enhanced AIOps capabilities and consistent security across the LAN, wireless LAN and WAN, which are of growing importance to digitally enabled enterprises. Fortinet’s ability to give networking teams access to high-quality insights that enable them to proactively optimise the network across SD-WAN, wired/wireless LAN and 5G/LTE gateways – from a single platform and management console – is a valuable feature of the company’s networking portfolio. Fortinet has a strong pedigree of more than 20 years pioneering the convergence of networking and security, which has helped make the company one of the key partners enterprises are trusting for their digital and network transformation needs across the campus, branch, edge and cloud.” – Brandon Butler, research manager: enterprise networks at IDC