“AI and ML have been a core part of our offering for a decade plus,” said Fortinet’s VP of Products
Cybersecurity software maker Fortinet announced Tuesday enhanced Artificial Intelligences Operations (AIOps) capabilities across its network software portfolio, including its Software-Defined Wide Area Networking (SD-WAN), wired and wireless Local Area Network (LAN) products, and 5G/LTE gateways. Fortinet claims this to be the industry’s first AI-based network operations management for 5G/LTE gateways.
“AI and ML have been a core part of our offering for a decade plus,” Fortinet’s VP of Products Nirav Shah told RCR Wireless News. “We’ve put (more than) 6 million sensors globally. That’s been important to first get the quality of telemetry data. As we get the telemetry data, now we’re using our tools for pattern recognition, and making sure that we’re providing customers with security insights.”
New AIOps enhancements in Fortinet’s wired and wireless LAN product portfolio provide Network Operations Center (NOC) teams “with real-time visibility of potential issues before network users are negatively impacted,” according to Fortinet. AIOps also provides a way for teams to configure configurable Service-Level Agreements (SLAs).
FortiAIOps was initially developed for Fortinet’s wired and wireless solutions, Shah said.
“In this specific release, we are now extending (AIOps) to SD-WAN and 5G LTE gateways,” he explained.
The addition of new AIOps functionality helps Fortinet SD-WAN “track metrics such as interfaces, system resources, and ISP bandwidth, as well as dynamically compute SLA baselines to ensure that the best performance is always achieved,” according to the company.
Fortinet’s FortiExtenders are cellular gateways to connect Wide Area Network (WAN) edges. Features include integrated security, Power over Ethernet (PoE) support, dual-sim and dual modem configurations, and out-of-band management using FortiExtender Cloud, cloud-based device management that enables provision, management, and monitoring of gateway devices from any location using a regular web browser.
The addition of AIOps capabilities to the FortiExtender gateways make Fortinet the only vendor to provide AIOps on a 5G/LTE link, according to the company.
“This critical evolution of AIOps expands visibility for NOC teams and allows analysis of data down to the WAN link level, not just at the SD-WAN abstraction level. This helps IT teams better diagnose issues and ensure resiliency,” said Fortinet.
The expansion of Fortinet’s AIOps functionality across its networking products has been driven by several industry factors, according to Shah. Anomaly detection is one.
“This has been a big ask for our customers,” said Shah. “They don’t want to see a number of trouble tickets came out, then they have to be reactive.”
Getting ahead of potential difficulties using AI and ML-driven predictive modeling can help Fortinet’s customers solve problems before they happen.
Helping customers reduce excessive bandwidth around 5G/LTE wireless WAN gateways is another, said Shah.
“We collect the data, put context behind it, and see that the way this trend is happening, maybe this is going to be an issue and alert the IT team before that capacity issue happens,” he said.
Shah sees Fortinet’s decade of experience in developing and refining AI and ML models as a strategic advantage compared to other network equipment vendors’ solutions.
“Building that AI and ML model takes time. But because we have been doing that for a decade plus, we believe that we have a really robust AI and ML engine. Now integrating that into our products and providing that broad view of AIOps across security and networking is something we are focusing on,” he added.
While these AIOps announcements cover Fortinet’s 5G/LTE wireless WAN gateways, the company’s also making efforts to improve its carrier-grade 5G security as well. Over the summer, NEC and Fortinet announced a new partnership to simplify 5G security for CSPs. Fortinet is supplying its security solutions like FortiGate, while NEC is providing professional network integration services for telcos. The goal, the businesses said, is to deliver end-to-end high-performance security for 5G networks.
“The companies will focus on key network security use cases and services, such as Radio Access Network (RAN), mobile roaming, Gi-LAN/N6 and telco/edge cloud security,” the businesses said in a joint statement. “NEC, as the network integrator, will leverage Fortinet solutions to deliver customer-oriented and carrier-grade services, leveraging its global reach across more than 150 countries.”
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