In 2004, GEMÜ ran a trial of the Fortinet FortiGate next generation firewall against other vendors’ solutions. The performance and capabilities of the FortiGate proved to be a perfect match with the company’s evaluation criteria, and models from the range were deployed across all locations. “From the outset, the FortiGates provided the protection we needed, were very intuitive to manage, quick to learn, and straightforward in terms of interpreting their findings,” reflected Scharpfenecker. “It’s proved to be a great product line that has continued to scale and meet our needs ever since.” Today, GEMÜ relies not only on FortiGates but further leverages the comprehensive Fortinet Security Fabric through its deployment of FortiMail-VM, FortiWeb-VM, FortiSandbox, FortiAP, and FortiWifi, in conjunction with the FortiGuard Services Bundle. Having a unified console for all of its Fortinet solutions enables GEMÜ’s IT department to operate efficiently. “The team enjoys the same familiar syntax across all our different units – from small to large – it’s the same interface across everything,” noted Scharpfenecker, “And that is an enormous contributor in keeping our IT organization lean and effective.” He concluded, “We have never been disappointed by a Fortinet product. The combined set of capabilities across the entire Fortinet Security Fabric gives GEMÜ a significant security advantage. “Fortinet helps GEMÜ keep the lights on around the world!”

The motivation for the full-scale replacement of the IT security infrastructure was the re-design of the company-wide network. As the base security platform, Schiller deployed a FortiGate 800C cluster. The ASIC-accelerated firewalls equiped with 10 Gbps ports provide all necessary defense and security mechanisms. Thanks to the 24/7 hour subscription to FortiGuard service, the firewalls are continually supplied with the latest signatures and are able to detect and protect against even the most recent attacks. Schiller has also implemented maximum security levels for their email systems via the integration of the Secure Messaging Appliance FortiMail from Fortinet. FortiMail ensures comprehensive virus and spyware protection and also includes the latest spam detection and filtering techniques. A constantly updated IP reputation database automatically ensures that connection requests from sender IP addresses with a poor reputation are completely rejected. As there is no one hundred percent guarantee that only bad emails are blocked (false negative) and that only good messages are delivered (false positive), FortiMail provides a quarantine feature: All rejected messages are safely stored separately, yet are available to be retrieved by the authorized user. Schiller installed the FortiWeb 400C to avoid compromising either security or services accessible via the Internet. The platform—integrated as a “reverse proxy”—includes all the security features required for the comprehensive protection of web applications. Furthermore it is designed to fend off white attack methods such as SQL injection, cross site scripting, buffer overflow, and brute force login. The FortiWeb appliance, configured using URL-based policies, ensures that web applications can no longer be crippled, that only authorized persons have access to sensitive information in databases, and that websites cannot be compromised. Schiller AG has deployed Fortinet’s seamless suite of security solutions to protect itself from every possible angle of attack.

Steelcase had been a long-time Fortinet customer for its internal systems. The company has deployed Fortinet FortiGate next-generation firewalls to secure its perimeter and for end-to-end protection. FortiAuthenticator provides Steelcase with centralized user identity management and simplified administration for authentication. FortiAnalyzer delivers a consolidated view and comprehensive reporting across all Fortinet devices in the widespread Steelcase environment. A cloud-based spam filtering service was recently replaced with the Fortinet FortiMail secure email gateway to provide powerful multi-vector detection and protection capabilities. FortiAP access points and FortiSwitch secure access switches are deployed at multiple locations across the company. FortiClient instances are leveraged to provide real-time actionable visibility across key areas of the infrastructure. Supplemental monitoring, management and provisioning for many of Steelcase’s extensive number of Fortinet appliances is achieved with the highly flexible FortiCloud service. As the company began ramping up its use of Azure, it was a logical move to leverage the broad portfolio of Fortinet cloudrelated solutions. Developers at Steelcase gain access to the Azure environment by using VPN tunnels established between on-premise FortiGates and a combination of the Fortinet FortiGate-VM for Azure and cloud-based FortiWeb VM web application firewalls.

A cornerstone of the reengineered environment has been the selection of the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). Cisco ACI utilizes an architecture based on software-defined networking (SDN) principles to reduce total cost of ownership, automate IT and IS tasks, and to accelerate data center application deployments. The addition of the Fortinet FortiGate Connector for ACI to the Cisco solution has enabled the bank to leverage the automated security provisioning and protection capabilities of the industry-leading range of FortiGate enterprise firewalls. The combination facilitates the application of enterprise security policies in a highly-granular manner that was not achievable with the legacy monolithic environment