Fortinet expands through acquisition of FortiCASB
Fortinet, a network security provider, has expanded its product range with the creation of FortiCASB, a Cloud Access Security Broker solution. The product will be rolled out through Salesforce and Office365.
Network security vendor Fortinet is expanding its product portfolio with a new Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB) product, suitably named FortiCASB.

The CASB market has been busy in recent years as vendors and enterprises alike rush to connect on-premises users and authentication systems with cloud delivered applications and services. While some vendors have partnered with CASB technology suppliers or even acquired startups, Fortinet has taken a different route.

“FortiCASB has been developed internally by Fortinet,” John Maddison, SVP of Products and Solutions at Fortinet, told EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet. “We evaluated other CASB solutions and determined that organically developing it would ensure that our customers would have seamless visibility and control as part of the Security Fabric.”

Among the other CASB vendors in the market today are Symantec, which gained CASB capabilities by way of its $4.65 billion acquisition of Blue Coat in 2016. Blue Coat itself had gained its CASB product by way of the $280 million acquisition of Elastica in 2015.

Networking giant Cisco has also been active in the CASB space, thanks to its $293 million acquisition of CloudLock in 2016.

From a competitive differentiation perspective, Maddison said that FortiCASB provides visibility of SaaS clouds both on and off-network, providing a single policy for both. Additional he noted that the new CASB platform will benefit from Fortinet’s deep application security knowledge.

“We are initially rolling out with a couple of key applications that our customers use most, Salesforce and Office365,” Maddison said. “Our long-term goal is to be the CASB provider of choice for all Fortinet customers.”

As a cloud based platform, FortiCASB is deployed by an enterprise’s administrator for each SaaS service. The FortiCASB product is separate from Fortinet’s FortiGate network appliances. From an identity, application management and control perspective, FortiCASB provides a number of capabilities including: Restrictions/DLP for data stored in SaaS applications, Geo/user profiling and entitlement management, on-demand data scanning, refined policies for audit controls and audit reports.

Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at EnterpriseNetworkingPlanet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.