A little less than a year ago, Fortinet launched a new subsidiary, Fortinet Federal, Inc., in order to better provide critical cyber solutions and professional services to the public sector. This past week, the Fortinet Federal team held its first Federal Partner Forum in Reston, VA to discuss how to successfully address the growing cybersecurity challenges being faced by Federal agencies. The Federal Partner Forum was designed to help organizations better understand the Federal marketplace, navigate the complexities of Federal procurement programs, and identify Federal IT and cybersecurity challenges and budget priorities.

Many of Fortinet's top thought leaders were in attendance, including Bob Fortna, President of Fortinet Federal, Phil Quade, CISO, Mike Bossert, Sr Vice President of NA Sales, Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Vice President of Strategy and Analytics, Troy Roberts, Vice President of Enhanced Technologies, Jon Bove, Vice President of Channel Sales, and Jeremy Furtney, Principal System Engineer for Cloud solutions.

Special guests included Admiral Mike McConnell, former Director of National Intelligence and a current Fortinet Federal board member, and Christopher Wiedemann and Sean McConkie from immixGroup, which is the largest value-added distributor of enterprise software and hardware products for public sector solution providers, systems integrators, and U.S. government agencies.

Event Overview

Sessions included information about how to size the Federal cybersecurity opportunity, strategies for delivering cutting-edge and profitable cybersecurity solutions, and how to extend profitability by offering critical value-added services. In addition, attendees had the opportunity to walk through Fortinet's portfolio family of security and networking solutions, learn about the advantages of a Security Fabric strategy, and review offerings from our extensive FortiPartner program -all with an eye towards how and where these solutions fit into current Federal infrastructure and development plans and mandates.

The forum concluded with a luncheon panel comprised of Phil Quade, Jonathan Nguyen-Duy, Mike McConnell, and Bob Fortna. Panelists discussed a wide range of topics affecting the Federal marketplace. These included such questions as how cloud adoption is changing the security posture of Federal agencies, why so few agencies have incorporated automation, centralized management, and third-party tools into their security integration strategy, and what sorts of security priorities and investments Federal agencies will need to make in the next 18 months to address the immediate threat landscape. Other questions included issues around the growth of unsecured IoT, digital transformation and connected citizens, and what security requirements of the future will look like.

Key Takeaways

The two most important takeaways from this event were first, an in-depth look at the issues, challenges, and budgetary requirements being faced by Federal agencies, and second, Fortinet Federal's commitment to assisting our partner community to successfully help those agencies meet their evolving challenges.

The reality is that Federal agencies have unique cybersecurity needs that require unique cybersecurity solutions. Because Federal resources and infrastructure are under constant attack from criminals, political hacktivists, and even hostile foreign governments, they require robust, integrated, and adaptive security solutions that are also constantly being updated in real-time with the latest threat intelligence.

Solutions provided by Fortinet Federal are ideal for all Federal agencies, from civilian agencies to the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. Fortinet solutions not only protect critical resources such as data center, network edge, and internal network segments, but are also designed to operate as a seamless, integrated fabric that extends from the core of the network out to endpoint and IoT devices and multi-cloud environments for consistent visibility and span of control across even the most distributed and elastic networked environments, whether those networks and data are classified or unclassified.

Fortinet's network security solutions currently protect the classified and unclassified systems of all 15 cabinet-level Federal agencies, as well as those of numerous independent executive agencies. Our solutions include USG products that have been specially configured for the federal market and that comply with a wide range of federal certification requirements, including FIPS 140-2, Common Criteria, , CSfC, TAA, and DoD UCAPL.

Read our paper to learn more about how Fortinet Federal helps U.S. government agencies address the unique security requirements of their environments.

Check out our latest Quarterly Threat Landscape Report for more details about recent threats.

Sign up for our weekly FortiGuard intel briefs or register for the new FortiGuard Threat Intelligence Service.