>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas.
It's theCUBE.
Covering Fortinet Accelerate 18.
Brought to you by Fortinet.
(upbeat music)
>> Welcome back to theCUBE.
Our continuing coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018.
We're excited to be here.
I'm Lisa Martin with Peter Burris,
and we're excited to talk to one of the Keynotes
the big cheese from the main stage session
this morning, John Maddison.
>> I say, small cheese I would say.
>> SVP of Products and Solutions at Fortinet.
Welcome back to theCUBE.
>> It's great to be here again.
>> So two things I learned about you
when you started off your Keynote.
One you're a Man City Fan, Manchester City.
>> Manchester City Blue.
>> Okay.
>> Through and through, for many years.
>> Premier League all the way.
And you have the best job at Fortinet.
>> I do indeed.
>> Wow.
>> That is to announce the new products of course.
>> So let's talk about that.
So you talked about some exciting announcements today.
Tell us about, start with a Security Fabric.
What's new there, what's going on, what's exciting?
>> Well the core of the Security Fabric is
FortiOS 6.0, that's our network operating system.
That's the core of he Fabric and when we
do a big release like this, many different features,
new functionalities.
Also we have tighter integration now between
all our products in the Fabric.
Bus, as I said, new features as well.
Things like SD-WAN has been improved,
we now have probably estimate of breed SD-WAN security.
The Fabric integration itself is going on.
We built out some new connectors with cloud.
Now we have connectors for all the public clouds.
All the public clouds.
We have a new CASB connector, acronym city,
of course, as usual, CASB is cloud access security broker,
API access the SaaS clouds.
And so we've got that not only in it's standalone form
but also very much integrated inside the Fabric.
We've also introducing some new FortiGuard service
as part of FortiOS 6.0, a new security rating
which is based on a bunch of new practices
or best practices that all our customers have said
this is great best practices, can you put this together
and apply these to our network overall.
That's just skimming the surface as I say,
I think I said there's 200 plus new services
I could have stood up there for like six hours or whatever.
But great new services are 6.0 big announcement for us.
>> We just chatted with your America's Channel
Chief Jon Bove, talk to us about.
>> Who's an Arsenal fan by the way.
>> What. >> And we beat him Sunday
three nil in the Cup final. >> Excellent.
>> Just to make sure you get this.
>> I'm sure. >> Write that down.
>> Jot that down.
>> So what excitement are you hearing in,
from your perspective, in the channel with respect
to all of the new announcements that you made today?
>> Great feedback, so this obviously is
a big channel partner event here.
You know what a lot of channel partners are saying
is that I need to make sure I provide more
of a solution to the customers.
In the past, you know maybe they sell a point product,
it's hard to kind of keep that relationship going
with that customer.
But if they sell a solution with one or two products
that's part of that solution or managed
and some services as part of that, it's much stickier
for the partners and gives them a bit more
of an architectural approach to their customers network.
They really like the Fabric as I said.
The Fabric doesn't have to be everything inside
the Fabric, they can be components.
It's what we've seen far from a Fabric components.
Our partners really latched on to the network
plus the advanced threat protection,
plus the management or plus the access points.
But they definitely prefer to sell a complete solution.
It's hard for them to manage 40 different security vendors,
the skill sets, the training and everything else.
Now they're not saying there needs to
be one security vendor, much as we would
like it to be Fortinet, but they need to be reduced
to maybe a set of 10 or 12 and really,
our Fabric allows them to do that.
>> That's a key differentiator.
>> Absolutely key differentiator and as I said,
you know it's very hard to build a Fabric.
It's a mesh network, all these products
talk to each other.
You can only really do that if you build
those products organically, step-by-step,
alongside the network operating system.
It's no good acquiring lots of bits and pieces
and trying to bolt it together, it's not going to work.
We spent a long time, 10 years, building out
this Fabric organically to make sure it integrates
but also putting the best of breed features
and things like SD-WAN and CASB.
>> What is the product?
In this digital world what is a product?
>> A security product?
>> Any kind of product.
As a guy who runs product management, what's a product,
can we talk about what is a security product?
>> I think in the past you know product management
used to be very focused on I've got a box
that comes out, or I've got a piece of software
that comes out, these days it could be virtual machine
or cloud, but it's doing a single instance,
there's a single thing that it's doing inside,
inside the network from a security perspective.
What we believe in is that multifunction,
now consolidation, multiple threat vectors
I refer to this that like the digital attack surface.
The digital transformation, security transformation.
The biggest issue though, is that digital attack surface.
That's just expanded enormously, it's very dynamic.
Things are coming on on off the network
was spinning up virtual machines and applications
here and there.
A point product these days just can't cope, can't cope.
You need solutions against specific threat vectors
that are applied in a dynamic way using the Fabric.
>> But arguably it's even beyond solutions.
You need to be able to demonstrate to the customer
that there is an outcome that's consistent
and that you will help achieve that outcome,
You'll take some responsibility for it.
In many respects, we move from a product
to a solution, to an outcome orientation.
Does that resonate with you and if so,
how does that influence the way you think
and the way that you're guiding Fortinet and partners?
>> Yes, definitely.
You know one of the first things they're very worried about
is you know can they see that digital attack surface.
It's very large now and it's moving around.
Their outcome, first outcomes to say,
do I know my risk on my attack surface?
That's the very first out.
Is it visible, can I see it, or can I protect it
or can I apply the right threat protection against that.
That outcome to them is they can see everything,
protect everything, but as I said also,
now they're moving into this more detection environment.
Where you've got machine learning, artificial intelligence
because you need to apply that.
The bad guys these days are very smart
in that they know they can morph things very quickly
and provide you know targeted attacks,
zero-day attacks, we probably haven't seen it before.
I hate this analogy where we say somebody
else got to get infected before everyone
else gets protected.
It shouldn't be that way.
With, you know, with technologies
like artificial intelligence, machine learning,
we should be able to protect everybody from day one.
>> Kind of pivoting on, you brought up the word outcome,
and I want to go off that for a second.
When you're talking with customers and you mentioned,
I think, before we went live that you visited,
talked to over 300 customers last year.
Who is at the table, at a customer,
in terms of determining the outcome we need to have?
Are we talking about the CSO's team,
what about folks in other organizations,
operational technology departments.
Who are you now seeing is in this conversation
of determining this outcome.
>> A new job role which I think been coming for a while,
it's the security architect.
Two years ago, I'll go into a room
and there would be the networking team on one side
of the table, this InfoSec team security side,
on this side of the table, the CIO over here
and the CSO over here and they be debating.
I would be almost invisible in the room.
They'll be debating what's going to happen
because you know the CIO wants to build out
more agile business applications, wants to move faster.
The security team has got to answer to the Board these days,
and they got to make sure everything's secure.
What's their risk factor?
And what I see is a new job function
called the security architect, that kind of straddles
a bit the networking team, understands what
they're building out from an SDN, architecture,
cloud perspective, but also understands the risks
when you open up the network.
The security architect provides more holistic,
long-term architecture view for the customer,
versus, I've got to fix this problem right now
I've got a hold of a bucket, I've got to fix it,
then we move on to the next.
They're building a system on architecture long term.
We have something called a Network Security Expert,
it's our training education capability.
We have an NSC eight, we have around 100 thousand people
certified in the last two years on NSC
between one and eight.
And about 100 people on eight, because eight's
a very high level architect level across all
the security technologies.
But we definitely see a lot of partners
who want to get their people trained to NCE level eight
because they would like to provide that security architect
that's in the customer now, that advice on what should be
that holistic security architecture.
The big change to me is that the networking team
and the security team have realized
they can't just keep fixing things day to day,
they need a more holistic long-term architecture.
>> Let's talk about that holistic approach.
At Wikibon we talk a lot about SiliconANGLE Wikibon,
we talk a lot about how the difference
between business and digital business is the role
that data assets play in the digital business.
I think it's a relatively interesting, powerful concept,
but there's not a lot of expertise out there
about thinking how is a data asset formed.
I think security has a major role to play
in defining how a data assets structured
because security in many respects is the process
of privatizing data so that it can be appropriated
only as you want it to.
What does the security architect do?
Because I could take what you just said
and say the security architect is in part responsible
for defining and sustaining the data asset portfolio.
>> Yes and you know, if you go back a few years,
there's data leakage prevention was a big area,
big marketplace, DLP is the best thing.
Their biggest problem that they did was
they couldn't tag the assets.
They didn't know what assets were so then when
it came to providing data protection they go well,
what is it, I don't know where it's from,
I don't know what it is.
And so that a whole marketplace kind of just went away.
We're still there a bit, but everyone's
really struggling with it still.
The 6.0 introduced something called tagging technology.
It's inherent already inside routing systems
and switching systems, SDN systems.
The tagging technology allows you to look at data
or devices or interfaces or firewalls
from a higher level and say this is
the business relationship between that device,
that data and what my business objectives are.
We talked about intent based network security
and the ability long term is to say,
hey, if I've got a user and I want to add
that user to this network at security level six
to that application, I say that,
then it gets translated into bits and bytes
and network comport and then gets translated
end-to-end across the network.
The tagging technology from my mind
is the first step in a to be able
to kind of tag interfaces and data and everything else.
Once you've got that tagging done
then you can apply policies as a much higher level
which are data centric and business aware centric.
>> I'm going to ask you a question related to that.
Historically, networks in the IT world
were device was the primary citizen right.
Then when we went to the web the page
became a primary citizen.
Are we now talking about a world in which data
becomes the primary citizen we're really talking
about networks of data?
>> I think to some extent.
If you look at the users today, they have
like maybe three or four devices.
Because students, universities, there's something
on with those lectures, they've got an iPad,
their iPhone, three devices attaching there.
I think the definition of one user and one device
has gone away and it's multiple devices these days.
And you know a lot of devices attaching
that no one has any clue about.
I don't think it's going to be completely data centric
because I still think it's very very hard to tag
and classify that data completely accurately
as it's moving around.
I think tends to be a part of it,
I think devices going to be part of it,
I think the network itself, the applications,
are all going to be part of this visibility.
In our 6.0 we provide this topology map
where you can see devices users.
You can see applications spin up,
you can see the relationship between those things
and the policies, the visibility is going to
be extremely important going forward
and then the tagging goes along with that
and then you can apply the policy.
>> With respect to visibility, I wanted to chat
about that a little bit in the context of customers.
One of the things that Ken talked about
in his keynote was. >> Ken?
>> Ken. >> Ken Xie.
>> Yes. (laughing) >> Ken who?
>> That guy?
The guy that steals slides from you in keynotes.
>> He did as usual. >> I know, I saw that.
>> Tells me like two minutes before tells me John,
I need that slide. (Peter laughing)
>> That's why you have the best job.
Everybody wants to copy you.
In terms of what what the CEO said, that guy,
that Fortinet protects 90% of the global S&P 100.
There were logos of Apple, Coca-cola, Oracle, for example.
In terms of visibility, as we look at either,
a giant enterprise like that or maybe a smaller enterprise
where they are, you mentioned this digital tax surface
is expanding because they are enabling
this digital business transformation,
they've got cloud, multi-cloud, mobile, IoT,
and they also have 20, north of 20,
different security products in their environments.
How did they get visibility across these disparate solutions
that don't play together.
How does Fortinet help them achieve that visibility,
so they can continue to scale at the speed they need to?
>> Well I think they use systems like SIM systems
we have a Forti SIM as well where you can
use standard base sys logs and SNMP
to get information up there so they can see it that way.
They're using orchestration systems to see parts of it,
but I think long term, I think I speak
to most customers they say, although there's specific,
new vendors maybe for specific detection capabilities,
they really want to reduce the number of vendors
inside their network.
You say 20, I sometimes I hear 30 and 40.
It's a big investment for them.
But they also realize they can't maintain it long term.
Our recommendation to customers is to,
if you've got some Fortinet footprint in there,
look at what's the most obvious to build out
from a Fortinet perspective.
Sometimes we're in the data centers
or sometimes we expand into the WAN
and sometimes we expand into the cloud.
Sometimes we'll add some advanced threat protection.
We're not saying replace everything obviously
with Fortinet, we're saying build
what's most obvious to you and then make sure
that you've got some vendors in that
which are part of our Fabric alliance.
We have 42 vendors now, security vendors,
from end point to cloud to management
that can connect in through those different APIs.
And when we click them through those APIs
they don't get you know the full Fabric functionality
in terms of telemetry and visibility
but they apply a specific functionality.
A good example would be an endpoint vendor
connecting through our sandbox not quite sure about files,
entered our sandbox we'll give them a recommendation back.
As soon as we know about that,
all the Fabric knows about it instantly across
the whole network because time is of the essence these days.
When something gets hacked, it's inside a network.
It's less than 60 seconds for something
for the whole network.
That's why segmentation, interim segmentation,
is still a very important project for our customers
to stop this lateral movement of infections
once they get inside the network.
>> But, very quickly, it does sound as though
that notion of the security architect,
this increasing complexity inside the network
and I asked the question about whether data
is going to be the primary decision,
you get a very reasonable answer to that.
But it sounds like increasingly, a security expert
is going to have to ask the question
how does this data integrate?
How am I securing this data?
And that, in many respects, becomes a central feature
of how you think about security architecture
and security interactions.
>> Yeah but I think people used to build a network
and bolt on security as an afterthought.
I think what they're saying now is we need
for the networking people and security people
to work together to build a holistic security architecture
totally integrated day one, not some afterthought
that goes on there.
That's why we know, we've been building the Fabric
all these years to make sure it's a totally integrated
Fabric end-to-end segmentation architecture
where you can also then connect in different parts
of the network.
It has to be built day one that way.
>> Last question, is sort of, I think we asked
your CSO this, the balance between enabling a business
to transform digitally at speed and scale.
I think it was one of you this morning,
that said that this is going to be the year
of security transformation.
Could've been that guy, that other guy,
that you know, steals your slides.
But how do how does a company when you're talking
with customers, how do they get that balance,
between we are on this digital transformation journey.
We've got a ton of security products.
How do they balance that?
It's not chicken and egg to be able to continue transforming
to grow profit, you know be profitable,
with underpinning this digital business
with a very secure infrastructure.
>> As I said, I think most of them got that now.
They kind of go, they've got this five-year plan
versus a one-year plan or a six-month plan
on the security side.
It's integrated into the network architecture plan long term
and that's the way they're building it out
and that's the way they've got a plan to get,
you know, you look at financial organizations
who want to provide internet access or branch offices.
They've got a plan to roll it out,
that's safe going forward, or they want
to add broadband access to their internet,
like 5G or broadband interconnection,
they've got a plan for it.
I think people are much more aware now
that when I build something out whether it be
on the data side on the network side,
it has to be secure from day one.
It can't be something I'll do afterwards.
I think that's the biggest change I've seen
in my customer interactions is that they absolutely,
essential is absolutely essential that they build out
a secure network from day one,
not an afterthought going forward.
>> Well, we'll end it there, secure network from day one.
John, thanks so much for stopping by theCUBE,
congratulations on the announcements
and we hope you have a great show.
>> Great thanks.
>> Thank you for watching, we are theCUBE,
live from Fortinet Accelerate 2018.
I'm Lisa Martin with my co-host Peter Burris.
Stick around, we'll be right back.