Fortinet releases FortiGate Rugged 60F, its SD-WAN appliance line for OT asset operators

Cybersecurity company Fortinet announced a new line of SD-WAN appliances targeted at operational technology (OT) environments for rugged sites in sectors such as utilities and energy, manufacturing and transportation. This comes at a time when SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network) is beginning to replace traditional WAN in remote OT sites, and provide these large enterprises with reliable connectivity, simplified management and lower total cost of ownership.

The two appliances – FortiGate Rugged 60F and FortiGate Rugged 60F with built-in LTE firewalls – will provide OT asset operators with rugged SD-WAN capability that can be remotely deployed, managed and monitored SD-WAN capability. With these appliances, OT players get access to specialized threat protection for securing critical industrial and control networks.

“The convergence of OT and IT is changing the way many organizations do business and is also opening up new security risks,” said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet in a press statement.

The FortiGate Rugged 60F combines SD-WAN, advanced routing and next-generation firewall security in a single, compact form factor, which enables the appliance to be deployed in space-sensitive environments. It also helps by reducing costs and simplifying operations for network analysts.

Designed to function in harsh environmental conditions, such as extreme temperatures, electromagnetic interference, high moisture, and extreme or constant vibration, the FortiGate Rugged 60F is ideal for deployment in smaller OT sites that require different mounting and power options than found in traditional IT wiring closets. For remote locations, the FortiGate Rugged 60F comes with an option for built-in LTE capability to provide an additional WAN connectivity option, apart from easier deployment and operation.

Built around Fortinet’s fourth-generation System-on-a-Chip, SoC4 SD-WAN ASIC, the FortiGate Rugged 60F platform delivers low-latency protection, including SSL decryption, and higher IPsec VPN scale on top of integrated SD-WAN capabilities, which are managed by Fortinet’s SD-WAN orchestrator. Combined with the Fortinet Security Fabric, asset operators get a single solution that covers the entire converged IT-OT network to close OT security gaps, besides delivering full visibility with simplified management.

The SoC4 architecture consolidates both network and content processing functions on a single chip, delivering fast application identification, steering, and overlay performance. It comes with a fully integrated set of security functions, including a Layer 7 firewall, on a fast and cost-effective chip that meets the high-performance requirements of asset operators to deliver optimal end-user experience and secure branches deployed in SD-WAN environments.

The enterprise network equipment market reached market revenue of US$13.75 billion in the second quarter of this year, equivalent to an increase of 10.9 percent from the first quarter of this year, and a decline of 1.7 percent from the same quarter last year, according to data released by analyst firm Gartner in September. SD-WAN, network detection, and response and core routers showed the strongest year-over-year growth, it added.

In July, industrial cybersecurity platform and services company Dragos partnered with Fortinet to release initial integration of the Dragos Platform with Fortinet’s FortiSIEM offering, by sending information received in critical OT networks to enterprise Security Operations Centers (SOCs). This will provide cyber defenders at industrial organizations with a unified view of threats and events across the converged enterprise IT and industrial OT environment, and the information can be used by security analysts for incident response and investigation.

Anna Ribeiro

Industrial Cyber News Editor. Anna Ribeiro is a freelance journalist with over 14 years of experience in the areas of security, data storage, virtualization and IoT.