Fortinet Acquires Bradford Networks: What MSSPs Need to Know

Fortinet, the cybersecurity products, software and services provider, has acquired network security firm Bradford Networks for an undisclosed sum. The Bradford team will join Fortinet as part of the transaction.

The Bradford acquisition enables Fortinet to enhance its Security Fabric network security solution, according to a prepared statement.

Furthermore, the Bradford acquisition extends Fortinet's ability to support and secure multi-vendor wired and wireless environments, Fortinet stated. It also allows Fortinet to deliver access control and Internet of Things (IoT) security solutions to empower enterprises with greater network visibility and protection than ever before.

A Closer Look at Bradford

Bradford provides the Network Sentry policy-based secure access automation and orchestration solution. Network Sentry offers a variety of network security capabilities, including:

Network Sentry is already integrated with the Security Fabric, including the FortiGate, FortiSIEM, FortiSwitch and FortiAP products, Bradford CEO Rob Scott said. Also, Bradford and Fortinet enable organizations to minimize the risk and impact of cyber threats in power, oil and gas, manufacturing and other critical infrastructure.

Fortinet Adds Machine Learning Capabilities to Its Web Application Firewall

In addition to the Bradford acquisition, Fortinet this week unveiled FortiWeb Web Application Firewall (WAF) software release 6.0, which uses machine learning for behavioral-based threat detection in web applications.

FortiWeb 6.0 leverages a two-layer approach of artificial intelligence-based machine learning and statistical probabilities to detect anomalies and threats separately, according to Fortinet. FortiWeb's first layer builds the mathematical model for each learned parameter and triggers anomalies for abnormal requests. Meanwhile, FortiWeb's second layer verifies if an anomaly is an actual threat or if it is a false positive.

The new version of FortiWeb is now available via hardware appliances, virtual machines (VMs) for all major hypervisor platforms, public cloud options for Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure and a hosted cloud-based solution.