Security specialist Fortinet announced the debut of Sovereign SASE and the integration of Generative AI (GenAI) technology into its Unified SASE offering.

Unified SASE provides integration between Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution and cloud-delivered security service edge (SSE).

It is managed through a single system with AI-driven features, flexible connectivity and unified management across on-premises and cloud environments.

FortiAI delivers context-aware GenAI assistance to help security operations (SecOps) and network operations (NetOps) teams make better decisions more quickly.

It was initially launched as a part of FortiSIEM and FortiSOAR and is now integrated with FortiAnalyzer, FortiManager, and Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, with additional integrations planned to bring GenAI capabilities across the company’s portfolio of security offerings.

“We’re focusing future integrations on the areas that would deliver the most value to our customers,” explained Nirav Shah, vice president of products and solutions at Fortinet.

Local Control Over Inspection, Logs

The sovereign SASE offering provides a comprehensive SASE delivery option that enables local control over inspection and logs, and gives organizations additional ways to take advantage of unified SASE and build a customized solution.

Businesses can determine how their data is routed and where security inspections occur, whether the data center is owned by Fortinet, a partner, or the customer while ensuring their traffic is protected by Fortinet’s security stack.

A sovereign solution lets organizations maintain local control over inspection and logs, bolstering data privacy and compliance and ensuring traffic is protected by Fortinet’s security stack.

This ensures data privacy and compliance while offering enhanced security and flexibility and is important for organizations operating in highly regulated verticals with sensitive data like finance, government and healthcare.

The latest enhancements to Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN assist with Day 0 through Day 2 operations, including automating the configuration of underlay secure SD-WAN tunnels between sites, setting up SD-WAN policies, troubleshooting issues such as why tunnels are down, or drilling down on IoT vulnerabilities.

FortiAI as IoT Security Assistant

The FortiAI integration with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN delivers a series of security and visibility improvements, including enhanced threat hunting and detection, while FortiAI now acts as an IoT security assistant discovering devices automatically and identifying vulnerabilities.

“Graphical representations help make sense of log data using voice commands,” Shah said.

He added that because both Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and cloud-delivered SSE use a single console, customers can view and update their configurations in a single place.

“IT teams no longer have to switch between consoles or spend time getting disparate solutions to communicate,” he said. “This makes it easier to deploy and manage the entire SASE solution, cuts costs, and saves time.”

John Bambenek, president at Bambenek Consulting, explained that between cloud adoption, and the increase in AI features, underlying technology is having additional abstraction layers wrapped around it to make it easier to manage in one place.

“While this is a great development for simplicity, only time will tell if these lead to a loss of understanding of how things work, which can then be exploited by attackers,” he said.

Additional recent Fortinet updates Unified SASE are aimed at enhancing security, network performance and management efficiency.

The cloud-based management console now includes native Remote Browser Isolation (RBI) to protect sensitive data from web-based threats.

The company’s Secure SD-WAN offering introduced improved network performance with on-demand full mesh networks and self-healing capabilities that address issues in real time.

The addition of native support for a system for cross-domain identity (SCIM) management streamlines user and group management, simplifying operations and reducing administrative workload.

In addition, Universal zero-trust network access (ZTNA) updates offer expanded access to any application from any location, with an application catalog that automates ZTNA configuration, eliminating the need for manual setup of each destination.