Building on more than 20 years of industry expertise, the Fortinet OT Security Platform provides comprehensive protection for the unique needs of OT environments.
Fortinet today announced it has advanced its OT Security Platform to further support the protection of critical infrastructure and industrial sites from evolving cyberthreats. New enhancements go beyond traditional OT visibility solutions and include deeper OT-specific threat visibility with the FortiGuard OT Security Service, expanded ruggedized solutions for segmentation and 5G in harsh environments, and an upgraded OT SecOps portfolio for automated threat response and regulatory compliance tracking.
“Fortinet has been building an industry-leading OT Security Platform for 20-plusyears and remains at the forefront of OT security innovation,” said Nirav Shah, Senior Vice President, Products and Solutions at Fortinet. “As cyberthreats against critical infrastructure and across industries such as energy, transportation, and manufacturing continue to grow, Fortinet remains committed to delivering comprehensive security solutions tailored for operational technology environments. These latest enhancements give organizations the tools they need to improve their OT security posture and adhere to regulatory requirements—all managed through a single, unified platform.”
“These latest enhancements give organizations the tools they need to improve their OT security posture and adhere to regulatory requirements—all managed through a single, unified platform.”
– Nirav Shah, Senior Vice President, Products and Solutions at Fortinet
Key Enhancements to the Fortinet OT Security Platform
The latest Fortinet OT Security Platform updates introduce powerful new capabilities to enhance OT security:
- New FortiGate Rugged NGFWs combined with new enhancements to the FortiGuard OT Security Service provide unparalleled security enforcement in OT environments, allowing organizations to detect threats across over 3,300 OT protocol rules, nearly 750 OT IPS rules, and 1,500 virtual patching rules. These capabilities protect against known exploited vulnerabilities (KEVs) and other cyber risks while delivering advanced threat protection through virtual patching for legacy OT systems. Additional new secure networking OT capabilities include updates to FortiSRA, enhancing secure remote access with improved secrets and password management for OT environments.
- To ensure secure segmentation, Fortinet has also introduced the FortiSwitch Rugged 108F and FortiSwitch Rugged 112F-POE, expanding its portfolio of industrial-grade small form-factor switches. These ruggedized switches allow for granular security enforcement at the port level, preventing unauthorized lateral movement across OT networks while maintaining seamless integration with Fortinet’s broader security ecosystem. These switches, built on Fortinet’s unified FortiOS operating system, streamline network and security management.
- For secure and resilient connectivity, Fortinet has also launched two ruggedized 5G solutions: the FortiExtender Rugged 511G, an IP67-rated 5G wireless WAN gateway that delivers high-speed, secure connectivity to remote OT sites; and the FortiExtender Vehicle 511G, an IP64-rated 5G router designed for fleet vehicles. Both solutions feature embedded Wi-Fi 6 and new eSIM capabilities, removing the need for physical SIM cards and simplifying carrier selection.
- Fortinet is also strengthening its AI-driven security operations(SecOps) capabilities for OT.Enhancements to FortiAnalyzer 7.6 and FortiDeceptor 6.1 provide deeper insights into security threats and simplify compliance reporting for OT security teams. Updates to FortiNDR Cloud include a new OT protocol support for threat hunting, while FortiNDR(on-premises) adds several new features, including a Purdue Model view and new device inventory that includes OT and theMitre ATT&CK ICS Matrix.
The Fortinet OT Security Platform provides unified visibility and security capabilities to manage OT and remote-site security, simplifying and empowering customers’ ability to assess, secure, and report on risk, including complex regulatory compliance requirements. Only Fortinet offers seamless segmentation capabilities and an end-to-end ruggedized portfolio of OT security solutions powered by a single operating system, FortiOS. Deep integration with the Fortinet Security Fabric makes the OT Security Platform the most comprehensive in the industry, providing the most effective, efficient, and holistic offering for OT security and compliance adherence that goes beyond the industry standard.
Industry Recognition and Customer Success
The Fortinet OT Security Platform is widely trusted by global organizations looking to seamlessly integrate IT and OT security. The company was recognized as the sole leader in the Westlands Advisory 2023 IT/OT Network Protection Platforms Navigator™, reinforcing its market leadership.
“Together, Fortinet and Honeywell help strengthen cybersecurity for critical infrastructure and operational technology environments. As cyberthreats intensify, industrial and commercial buildings operators need integrated end-to-end protection more than ever. Our relationship with Fortinet enhances Honeywell’s cybersecurity and ICT offering portfolio providing several strategic advantages in securing and managing risk for remote and on-campus customer sites; as well, reinforcing our commitment with Fortinet.
Honeywell leverages the Fortinet FortiGate and FortiGate Rugged series alongside Honeywell’s OT Cybersecurity portfolio to provide unmatched services capabilities to help reduce risk, enhance resilience, improve compliance, and secure operations from the edge to the enterprise,” said Manish Goyal, General Manager, Honeywell Connected Cybersecurity.
Chris Lubinski, Network Security Engineer, Alleima, stated, “Management at remote Alleima locations has been very complimentary of the Fortinet infrastructure. Their connections are much faster and more stable, and our response time for their support tickets is around tenfold quicker. Everyone at Alleima is much, much happier with the global network and security infrastructure we now have.”
“The increased performance and resilience of the new network, combined with simpler management, reporting, and analytics, has reduced the workload on our security team by at least 15%, which means we now have the bandwidth to move on to the next phases of our digital transformation, things like zero trust, and IT/OT convergence, and given our experience so far, we fully expect to be making these transitions with Fortinet,” said Wolfgang Bitomsky, Ph.D., CIO, FCC Environment CEE.
Why Securing OT Environments is Important
As bad actors increasingly target critical infrastructure, governments worldwide strengthen cybersecurity regulations for OT and industrial control systems (ICS). These changes include stricter security directives, incident reporting requirements, and a focus on building resilience against cyber incidents.
Because of a breach’s political and societal ramifications, OT networks are an extremely valuable target for well-funded and often state-sponsored threat actors. Although some notable OT disruptions have occurred because of attacks on linked IT systems, such as ERP, MES, or billing, other OT breaches were caused by custom malware designed to exploit OT networks. The OT Security Platform includes OT-specific capabilities and controls to protect against the latest, highly targeted attacks. Organizations with OT infrastructure must build a comprehensive OT security strategy to meet these requirements, and the recent updates to the Fortinet OT Security Platform can help.
