Fortinet Delivers Industry's First Secure Content Processing Systems That Enable Virus Scanning, Content Filtering, and Other Applications to be Deployed as Network Services

Business Wire, May 6, 2002

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

NetWorld Interop 2002 Las Vegas

Booth #7888

LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 6, 2002

FortiGate Product Family First to Deliver Real-Time Security,

Virus Scanning, and Content Filtering at the Network Edge

Advancing the state of the art for network protection, Fortinet Inc., today announced immediate availability of its FortiGate(TM) family of Secure Content Processing Gateways (SCPGs). The six FortiGate products are the first to support network-based delivery of high-performance, application-level services such as virus protection and content filtering; they also support network-level services such as firewall, virtual private networks (VPNs), intrusion detection, and traffic shaping. These services enable organizations to improve security, reduce network misuse and abuse, and better utilize their communications resources, without compromising network performance. Fortinet announced the FortiGate Series today at the Networld Interop show in Las Vegas.

Editors Note: Fortinet will be demonstrating its FortiGate products at NetWorld Interop, May 7-9, in booth #7888.

"Many organizations are struggling to balance their need for continuous, high-performance access to the public network with their needs for increased security, better control of network usage, and reduced spending on IT equipment and staff," said Ken Xie, president and CEO of Fortinet. "Our FortiGate platforms address major gaps in the current approaches to network security and content management by providing improved security and content control, high performance, easy deployment, and lower equipment and management costs. We've received very positive user reactions and look forward to building on our initial success."

FortiGate SCPGs are dedicated hardware/software platforms located at the edge of enterprise and service provider networks that are powerful enough to scan content at the application level and detect network threats in real time. Designed by a team led by Xie, original founder and former chairman of NetScreen Technologies, the FortiGate SCPGs employ Fortinet's Accelerated Behavior and Content Analysis System (ABACAS(TM)) technology, which leverages breakthroughs in ASIC chip design, networking, security, and content analysis to offer hardware-accelerated performance. The six FortiGate models address the needs of small offices/home offices (SOHOs), small businesses, branch offices, enterprises, and service providers, offering throughput of up to 2 Gbps.

"Host-based, anti-virus and content-filtering offerings have definite benefits, but the challenge to deploy them throughout an extended enterprise requires a lot of effort to manage and can still leave companies open to attacks and inappropriate content," said Matthew Kovar, director, Security Solutions & Services Planning Service at The Yankee Group. "By enabling key applications like anti-virus and content filtering to be delivered in a dedicated platform, Fortinet is delivering on The Yankee Group's vision for the next generation of network-based security services. We believe that network-based deployment of application-level content processing is an idea whose time has come. The FortiGate product line represents the start of a major evolution in how organizations will deploy network security and content management services."

Breaking the Barrier to Improved Security and Content Control

Today, effective network protection requires more than packet-level filtering and encryption. Content-borne viruses and worms, inappropriate Web content, and email spam all threaten network efficiency and organizational productivity. The FortiGate Series is the first to break the Content Processing Barrier caused by the inability of conventional network devices to handle the enormous amount of processing -- up to 100 times that required by network-level functions such as firewall services -- needed for application-level analysis of network content in real time.

To date, the only viable solution for delivering these application-level services has been to allow potentially harmful or inappropriate content to penetrate an organization's first line of defense -- the firewall/VPN gateway -- and install and maintain anti-virus, content filtering, and spam elimination software on host desktops and servers where content can be processed without real-time constraints. Though host-based solutions play an important role in an organization's overall security and content management architecture, they still leave organizations open to attack -- especially during the "vulnerability window" that exists between the time that a new threat is detected and an updated list of known threats is installed on every host on the network.

The FortiGate series' unique architecture breaks the Content Processing Barrier, closes the vulnerability window, and delivers a full suite of application-level and network-level services in a single device located at the network edge, thus removing many of the limitations imposed by using a collection of disparate devices. For example, VPN gateway functionality lets Fortinet products "see inside" encrypted VPN tunnels and perform content analysis on data streams that would otherwise pass through unchecked.