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Fortinet Security Fabric Explained: Three Attributes and Five Pillars

What the Fortinet Security Fabric is, as Fortinet describes it: a network-wide security architecture with three attributes and five pillars.

Cybersecurity ASEAN editors · 1 min read

The Fortinet Security Fabric is Fortinet's name for a security architecture that, in the company's description, spans an organisation's whole network and is meant to deal with every attack vector inside it. The thinking is that every point on a network belongs to one fabric, so it's protected as a single piece and each strand gets the same cover.

Broad, integrated and automated

Fortinet sums the Fabric up with three attributes.

  1. Broad. The Fabric converges networking with security for users, endpoints, edges and clouds alike. Fortinet says that's what allows threat detection and policy enforcement to be coordinated over the full attack surface and its lifecycle.
  2. Integrated. Security, operations and performance are brought together to give a view of the whole estate at once. According to Fortinet, that visibility closes security gaps and makes protection less complicated to run.
  3. Automated. Here the company points to cloud-scale processing and advanced AI, which it says deliver coordinated protection across the attack surface in close to real time. The stated payoff is leaner operations and a shorter time to prevention.

The five pillars

Fortinet credits the Fabric's reach to five pillars.

  1. Security-Driven Networking. A single integrated system handles both traffic and protection, and it extends to any edge.
  2. Zero-Trust Access. Fortinet's own zero-trust access checks every person and every device trying to get onto the network.
  3. Adaptive Cloud. This pillar covers making good use of cloud resources through auto-scaling, dynamic load balancing and visibility into the application user experience. It also includes FortiGuard, described by Fortinet as an AI-driven suite of security services that makes context-aware policy possible.
  4. Fortinet Fabric Management Centre. Centralised management sits here, together with Security Fabric Analytics and the automation and orchestration of the network. In Fortinet's account, the outcome is one console for networks, endpoints and clouds.
  5. Open Ecosystem. The Fabric can be extended with solutions from Fortinet's Fabric-Ready Partners. Those integrations don't add a second console; they're run from the same single management view.

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