SUNNYVALE, Calif., Nov. 05, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) --
John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet
“For IT, complexity is a hinderance to agility and scalability. Fortinet is offering an integrated and powerful solution, removing complexity and improving operations for companies such as Batteries Plus Bulbs by providing the efficiency of a single pane of glass combined with the performance enhancements that come with our SD-WAN ASIC to make the IT and network teams more efficient. Increasingly, customers recognize SD-WAN as a business enabler. The more companies recognize this, the more they select Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution for its SD-WAN functionalities combined with advanced security built into one single offering.”
News Summary
Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced that specialty retailer Batteries Plus Bulbs has deployed Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution to improve security and simplify operations at its 740 Stores - without increasing costs.
Batteries Plus Bulbs is the nation’s largest and fastest-growing battery, light bulb and smartphone/tablet repair franchise with a nationwide network of stores. The retailer offers more than 60,000 types of batteries, light bulbs and accessories -- offering the widest selection of battery and light bulb products available to consumers, businesses and government entities at the national and local levels. In 2014 and 2015, the company was named as one of the Top 10 Best Franchises to Buy in America by Forbes, within its investment category, and the number one franchise in the battery category by Entrepreneur magazine for the last seven years.
Previously, the company employed a cybersecurity infrastructure that featured a legacy firewall administered by a managed security services provider (MSSP) and other, non-integrated tools managed in-house. To further protect their infrastructure based on previous setup shortcomings, Batteries Plus Bulbs deployed and managed various point products, including an intrusion prevention system (IPS) and antivirus tools. In addition to the hassle of managing multiple point products, the team had limited visibility into the company’s overall security posture.
Now, the retailer’s solution is built on FortiGate next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) installed at each store, with built in Secure SD-WAN functionality. The FortiOS operating system underlying the NGFW technology also enables all other Fortinet Security Fabric solutions—including third-party solutions developed by Fabric Partners—to be seamlessly integrated, eliminating the previous silos that hampered visibility for the IT team. One particularly welcome feature of the FortiGate NGFWs is FortiGate Secure SD-WAN functionality, which the company uses to connect its 740 stores to the headquarters. As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution combines networking and security features, such as advanced routing, application control and next-generation firewall, enabling Batteries Plus Bulbs to manage and configure its WAN and security system from a single-pane-of-glass view via FortiManager. This robust software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) technology enables the company to safely use the public internet to scale network traffic, rather than relying solely on expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) circuits.
Batteries Plus Bulbs has experienced the following results from the Fortinet SD-WAN deployment:
- Increased Application Visibility: Batteries Plus Bulbs greatly increased the level of visibility of the company’s security posture, infrastructure, and business application prioritization. With its prior solution, the retailer did not have access to actionable insights about what risks the company faced or what could be done about them. Now, the team can draw security information by glancing at a screen and can drill down to any level of detail needed. This allows the retailer to take a more proactive stance to managing security.
- Heightened Analytics & Reporting: An integrated security architecture with analytics-powered security and log management capabilities adds to Batteries Plus Bulbs’ increased visibility. The retailer also utilizes FortiManager VM and FortiAnalyzer. As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiAnalyzer supports analytics-powered use cases to provide better detection against breaches. Further, these tools enable centralized management from a single pane of glass, detailed reporting, workflow automation, and trends analysis.
- Improved WAN Performance: Automated multi-path intelligence, a key feature of FortiOS for SD-WAN, significantly reduces latency for Batteries Plus Bulbs and its 740 locations by selecting the most efficient route for business-critical traffic through the tracking of granular WAN path information.
- Simplified Management: With an integrated solution, Batteries Plus Bulbs manages both SD-WAN optimization and security capabilities using a single interface. This integration of network and security operations makes it easy to tie traditionally network-centric issues such as performance and functionality to critical NGFW capabilities and SSL data inspection. The single console management helps the retailer better allocate its IT resources to increase productivity and reduce business costs.
- Scalability: With Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution, Batteries Plus Bulbs can continue growing its business and expanding operations, easily and securely adding new SD-WAN branches to its growing network, making adding additional security products and services very easy. Batteries Plus Bulbs credits having a single provider with giving them economies of scale and confidence, knowing that services added later will be compatible because of the depth and breadth in Fortinet’s Security Fabric.
Supporting Quote
“Because of our Fortinet Security Fabric and SD-WAN deployment, Batteries Plus Bulbs and its 740 locations boasts better application performance and simplified operations. Our previous infrastructure utilized numerous point products that led to a lack of visibility. With the integrated Fortinet solution, we have an efficient, scalable network architecture with single-pane-of-glass visibility—and enhanced protection against cybersecurity risks—at the same cost as the old solution. Now we can take a more proactive stance to manage security and have confidence that we are equipped to manage the security threats that may come our way.”
- Dan Dugan, Vice President of Information Technology, Batteries Plus Bulbs
Additional Resources
- Read more about Fortinet’s SD-WAN customer momentum.
- Learn more about Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN and Secure SD-Branch solutions.
- Find out more about Fortinet Secure SD-WAN’s position in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure and NSS Labs Recommended Rating.
- Find out how Fortinet’s Security Fabric delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization’s entire digital attack surface from IoT to the edge, network core and to multi-clouds.
- Learn more about FortiGuard Labs and the FortiGuard Security Services portfolio.
- Learn more about the FortiGuard Security Rating Service, which provides security audits and best practices.
- Learn more about Fortinet’s Network Security Expert program, Network Security Academy program, and FortiVets program.
- Follow Fortinet on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram.
FTNT-O
About Fortinet
Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT) secures the largest enterprise, service provider, and government organizations around the world. Fortinet empowers its customers with intelligent, seamless protection across the expanding attack surface and the power to take on ever-increasing performance requirements of the borderless network - today and into the future. Only the Fortinet Security Fabric architecture can deliver security without compromise to address the most critical security challenges, whether in networked, application, cloud or mobile environments. Fortinet ranks #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide and more than 415,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. Learn more at http://www.fortinet.com, the Fortinet Blog, or FortiGuard Labs.
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