Virtualization in security is Fortinet’s game plan this year

BANGALORE, INDIA: Fortinet Inc is working on virtualization in security—a concept which it feels will gain ground this year in India.

Already the company has deployed some projects on this technology on some verticals like airlines and banks and after doing this successfully is gearing its partners to offer this to their entire set of existing clients.

Said Vishak Raman, Regional Director—India and SAARC, Fortinet Inc, “So far people think of virtualization and think that it is limited to networking, desktops and servers. When we tell them that even security can be virtualized, our partners and customers alike find it very hard to believe. Now that we have a couple of successful projects around virtualized security under our belt, we are ready to go out in the market and evangelize this concept.”

A virtualized security environment leverages virtual domains (VDOMs) and virtual LANs (VLANs)
Raman shared that with VDOMs, large companies can use a common infrastructure to provide routing and network protection for several of their own organizations and internal customers.

This is useful for enterprises and service provides, where each organization requires its own network interfaces (physical or virtual), routing requirements and network protection rules.

Similarly, with VLANs a single physical trunk can support up to 4,096 virtual networks, which would have multiple customers and applications, while providing a method to manage traffic and network performance.

The key benefits of having a virtual network security environment is enabling better management of multiple domains and networks from a single device with domain specific administrative policies as well as scalability to support several VDOMs and VLANs without impacting overall network throughput.

More users and applications can also be added on the fly, without having a disruptive effect on the network.

“Specific solutions can be applied on a per customer or per application basis while providing a low cost of ownership,” added Raman.

This apart, in light of the current slowdown and the subsequent liquidity crunch that it has brought on partners, Fortinet is considering working on ways to help its channel.

It will negotiate with its distributors to ease the credit terms for some of its partners when the customer delays payments.

“Based on the channel’s performance and credit worthiness, we can work with the distributor to extend the credit limit and time for our 28 partners, on selective case to case basis,” said Vishak Raman.

Besides this, in case the customer does not pay the channel then Raman thinks it would call for strict measures like deactivating his security service.

Since this move can have legal implications, he is working on getting this done at a global level by making representations in Fortinet, Inc.

“We would have to put a disclaimer in our service contract clearly stating that in case the client does not pay our partner then we have the right to deactivate the service, but this has to be done on a global level,” he explained.

Fortinet is also working on ways and means to enforce strict channel discipline among partners.

For instance, when it comes to policies like case locking by channel partners, this will be made non-negotiable but there will be built-in qualification to prevent it from being misused.

“These qualifications could include after identifying a case, has the channel partner doing the demo, has the technology been positioned, has the need been identified and taken to the logical conclusion,” Raman said.

During good times vendors tend to dilute these policies, which is why Raman feels that this is the time when vendors need to be stricter about it rather than saying that by hook or by crook they just need to get the order.

These are few of the things that Raman has on his plate for the channels this year.