Users, devices, and business applications require increasing bandwidth to perform essential tasks. At the same time, IDC projects there will be 55.7 billion connected IoT devices by 2025. As the number of wireless devices deployed inside organizations-from laptops and smartphones to printers and other connected IoT devices-continues to grow, organizations are racing to address the escalating demand for secure, high-speed access to the network. And they are doing this by deploying growing numbers of next-generation wireless access points (APs) capable of delivering 5G speeds at scale.

The challenge is that the underlying legacy switching infrastructure that needs to support these new A-Ps is struggling to keep up. To ensure network availability to all these resources while maintaining an optimized user experience, organizations need to upgrade their infrastructure with high-performance switches designed to intelligently organize AP traffic and scale throughput to prevent bottlenecks that can impact network performance.

Introducing the FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 series

Fortinet has introduced two new switches to the FortiSwitch portfolio to address this challenge. The FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 series have been specifically designed to meet the modern campus's performance, port density, and scalability demands while maintaining the simplicity, scalability, and security that the family of FortiSwitch solutions is famous for.

For secure campus access, the multi-gigabit FortiSwitch 600 series delivers up to 5GE access and 25GE uplinks that optimize performance and are natively designed to ensure secure network access. The 600 series intelligently supports and optimizes traffic from next-gen APs to business-critical destinations to maintain a positive user experience. And for the campus core, the FortiSwitch 2000 series supports larger, more complex environments by aggregating high-performance access switches, like the FortiSwitch 600.

Advanced Management and Security Built In

Like all FortiSwitch models, the FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 also integrate with FortiAIOps, Fortinet's advanced AI for IT operations tool. FortiAIOps monitors network performance to provide real-time insights into potential issues and automate manual tasks to address issues before they become an issue.

When IT teams use a FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) as their switching controller, they eliminate the challenge of separately managing a security overlay, as FortiSwitch and FortiGate NGFW devices are designed to work as a single, integrated system. This enables Fortinet to integrate security and visibility features like device profiling and control for IoT and role-based access and control for users at no additional cost. They also benefit from FortiGuard AI-Powered Security Services, including advanced malware protection, IPS, sandboxing, and web filtering down to the Ethernet port. Bringing security and networking together helps organizations consolidate point products, improve visibility, centralize security management, and protect LAN traffic from sophisticated threats.

The Issue Is Secure Connectivity

In today's digital world, cybersecurity must be part of every transaction. Because of this, a fast network is only half the solution. Anything can bog down a network, from suboptimal application access to compromised devices. At the same time, organizations are looking to implement new zero-trust strategies to provide secure access to resources and maintain strict control of critical systems. The challenge is that these goals are difficult to achieve when security and networking are managed as separate, isolated solutions.

The most effective approach is to create a unified web of visibility and control that can address both networking and security issues and apply and enforce network and security policies consistently across the network by extending NGFW features and inspection to the LAN. And ideally, it needs to do all this through a single console. When networking and security solutions are converged in this way, organizations will experience greater control and faster response and be able to implement levels of automation to optimize and secure the network, which isn't possible when security is deployed as an overlay.

FortiSwitch devices are the first networking appliances specifically designed to do this. And we've been delivering advanced wired and wireless LAN solutions that converge networking and security for 20 years. Our unique platform approach begins with a single operating system, FortiOS. By building on a common framework, we deliver a level of integration and convergence between networking and security solutions that is unavailable anywhere else.

Our new FortiSwitch 600 and 2000 series devices are the latest additions to our secure connectivity platform strategy. They allow organizations to deliver comprehensive security and access control, performance, and unified management throughout the LAN, giving IT teams unprecedented visibility and control across the entire LAN. This, in turn, simplifies onboarding new users and devices, updating policies, proactively detecting and correcting performance issues, and identifying and eliminating security gaps created by shadow IT-all while reducing staff overhead and improving ROI. It really doesn't get much better than that.