The new integrations automate the setup and deployment of firewall services to protect inbound and outbound public cloud traffic
Alkira announced Tuesday a new partnership with cybersecurity company Fortinet to integrate Alkira’s Cloud Area Networking infrastructure with Fortinet products. The new cloud security integration helps automate configuration and deployment of firewall services to protect inbound and outbound traffic from major cloud service providers.
“Alkira automates all of the network plumbing, allowing customers to insert firewall services across their Cloud Area Networking infrastructure. The features enabled by the partnership are now available to all Alkira and Fortinet customers,” Alkira said in a statement.
Alkira’s Cloud Area Networking platform was announced in June. Alkira describes the offering as a “full stack edge-to-cloud enterprise-grade network,” which includes built-in routing and network services. Alkira said it’s the only network built in the cloud and delivered as a service, requiring customers to outlay no hardware costs and requiring no software agents to install.
“Cloud was supposed to make life easier, but it has grown more complex as customers struggle to manage islands of networking, each with its own rules and tools. They thought they were buying agility, but what arrived was a mountain of complexity and technical debt,” said Alkira CEO Amir Khan, who added that Cloud Area Networking is “built for the cloud, but grounded in reality.”
Alkira promises to “unify everything” with Cloud Area Networking, providing end-to-end network function visibility from on-premise to cloud. That includes visualization of all network traffic, including traceroute, packet capture, flow capture and policy inspections.
Key features enabled by the new cloud security collaboration between the companies include FortiManager integration. This provides a familiar management interface for network security teams already familiar with Fortinet products, the companies said. The integration supports automatic scaling up and down, to help manage traffic surges. It will also allow enterprises to extend existing firewall zones into and across clouds.
“Alkira takes existing on-prem security and expands it to multiple clouds,” said the company.
For Vinod Sunderraj, senior director, Cloud Security Product and Solutions at Fortinet, the new solution helps to take some sting out of safeguarding network traffic between enterprise users, different site locations and multiple public and private clouds.
“This collaboration and integration with the Fortinet Security Fabric provides a quick, easy, and reliable way to protect Cloud Area Networking traffic, securing traffic to the cloud, within the cloud, and between clouds,” said Sunderraj.
Fortinet scored a win with Orange Business Services (OBS) earlier this year when OBS announced that it was tapping the security firm for its Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution. SASE converges principles of software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) and network security into a single service model delivered in the cloud. The trend towards SASE solutions reflects the reality of an emerging hybrid workforce which needs to work from anywhere and still be relatively secure, according to the company.
