Wi-Fi is the de facto network choice for most organizations — large and small, across all industries. It’s easy to see why: Ease and speed of deployment for the organization and personal convenience for employees. Furthermore, recent iterations of the standard, such as 802.11ac, solve performance issues, bringing wireless throughput fully on par with a cabled Ethernet.
That, in a nutshell, is why millions of new Wi-Fi certified devices intended for business ship worldwide every day (and that doesn’t even count the consumer devices used for business purposes). It’s why, for the foreseeable future, Wi-Fi will continue to dominate the LAN space.
So far, so good — except that Wi-Fi security is also a leading cause of concern for IT leaders, and that’s been true since it first became popular almost fifteen years ago. How can you help your customers address these concerns?
Access to the WLAN is only the beginning of real security.
Let’s begin by discussing the real problem: There is, or should be, far more to Wi-Fi security than simple access.
Yes, the original Wi-Fi access standard WEP was long ago replaced with more secure standards. These days, WPA2 is generally recognized as unassailable in a practical sense.
But access control per se is only an initial sketch of security, not the whole picture. Thanks to the sophistication and scope of security threats like advanced targeted phishing and polymorphic malware, organizations of all sizes — from the full-blown enterprise to the up and coming SMB — are looking for ways to lock down wireless security in a much more comprehensive way.
Specifically, they’re looking for:
- Network intrusion prevention. This is necessary to mitigate or eliminate threats that may have made their way into the network despite access control measures.
- Web filtering. Where are users going, and what happens when they get there? Some sites, domains, and indeed, entire countries are a great deal more problematic than others from a security standpoint.
- Anti-virus. Seems awfully basic to expect this as part of the Wi-Fi security package, yet it very rarely is included.
- Application control. Here too, we find a shortfall of traditional Wi-Fi security, which doesn’t even conceive of the application layer as something to be addressed.
Offer complete Wi-Fi security for customers of all sizes and network topologies.
Wouldn’t it be great if you could bring customers a new solution that checks every one of those boxes? That’s exactly what Fortinet’s secure WLAN solution portfolio does. It brings an enterprise-class feature set to a more cost-effective and easy-to-manage solution than any competitor.
It’s true no matter what kind of customer you’re working with. That’s because the Fortinet approach is delivered via three different, but functionally equivalent, platforms:
- FortiWiFi. An entry-level offering that includes standalone appliances, a full-featured access point, LAN switch, and basic FortiGate (next-generation firewall).
- FortiAP with FortiGate. A series of Fortinet access points combined with a more powerful FortiGate Wi-Fi controller. Supports branch offices through WAN functionality as well.
- FortiAP-S with FortiGCloud. This offering is aimed at managed service providers who want to offer Wi-Fi security in a cloud context.
All this means that as a partner of Fortinet, you’re in a great position to offer your customers a comprehensive Wi-Fi security solution regardless of their business size, network topology or deployment model. Contact us (Fine Tec) to learn how.