Product Watch: New Fortinet Tools Help Enforce Policy By Device, Reputation

What enterprise resources should a user be allowed to access? As users become increasingly mobile and bring their own devices to work, the answer may vary according to the user, the time of day, and the device being used.

"Security policy needs to be flexible," says Kevin Flynn, senior product marketing manager at Fortinet, which introduced a raft of new products this week. "What you allow the user to do may be different if they're sitting at their desktop PC than what you'd allow them to do from their own smartphone, or at a coffee shop off the VPN."

Fortinet Tuesday released new products designed to support that sort of flexible enterprise security policy. The company unveiled Version 5.0 of its FortiOS software, which uses device and reputation as filters for enforcement of enterprise security policy.

The new products, which also include client security and enterprise management tools, enable enterprises to change a user's access privileges based on the device being used. This approach makes it easier for companies to build and enforce bring-your-own-device (BYOD) policies across the enterprise, Flynn says.

"In addition to traditional signatures, we're scoring devices based on what they are and what their behavior is," Flynn states. "The administrator can look at the behavior and enforce a different policy if the behavior is risky."

A client reputation feature in FortiOS 5.0 gives enterprises a cumulative security ranking of each device based on a range of behaviors and provides specific, actionable information that enables organizations to identify compromised systems and potential zero-day attacks in real time, Fortinet says. A new advanced anti-malware detection system adds an on-device behavior-based heuristic engine and cloud-based AV services that includes an operating system sandbox and botnet IP reputation database.

The new products also offer the ability to secure mobile devices and BYOD environments by identifying devices and applying specific access policies as well as security profiles, according to the device type or device group, location and usage.

In addition, the new technology helps enterprises to enforce policy differently based on the user's identity or location. "[FortiOS 5.0 offers] automatic adjustment of role-based policies for users and guests based on location, data and application profile," the company says. "Enhanced reporting and analysis also provides administrators with more intelligence on the behavior of their network, users, devices, applications and threats."

FortiOS 5.0, FortiManager 5.0, FortiAnalyzer 5.0, and FortiClient 5.0 will be available this month.

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