What I Learned at Accelerate18

I was incredibly blessed to get the opportunity to go to Las Vegas this year for the Fortinet Accelerate 18 conference. For those that don’t know, this conference is the Fortinet Conference where they unveil all the goodies, provide excellent hands on trainings, and give the clients, partners, and distributors the unique opportunity to mingle, get to know each other, and more importantly put faces to names for people that could have been working together for years and never got the face to face time they normally would have.

As always, this event was a blast. Obviously, any event that takes place in Sin City is going to be a fun adventure for any red-blooded male that has a few bucks and some time to kill but let’s face it, that could probably be said about any major city these days.

This little post is going to be a summary of the things I consider to be the most important that I learned at the conference this year. This is purely subjective and geared more towards my interests so you may have differences of opinion.

FortiOS 6

Just as FortiOS 5.6 was starting to get stable enough to use Fortinet has unleashed FortiOS 6 which is going to bring a plethora of new features and capabilities. A lot of you will get a kick out of the revamped SD-WAN capabilities that make the functionality far superior to existing iterations. Not to mention the incredible visibility enhancements that are going to make your ability to decipher what is truly taking place on your network much easier.

FortiGate 6000 Series

The 7000 series (I’m running a 7060E) is an incredible piece of machinery. The 6000 series is going to provide excellent performance but in an appliance form. So, while you may be looking at doing some data center consolidation or space reduction this is definitely going to be the edge “top of rack” style FortiGate that you are going to look at. The Chassis are large, and with real estate being a premium, this appliance is really going to be a great replacement for those that aren’t looking to grow into the device (most chassis clients approach)

Wie Ling Neo Is Super Intelligent

Ok, so I didn’t learn this at Accelerate18. I got to learn this directly by having some discussions with her while troubleshooting some 7060E issues. Wie Ling is the product manager for the 5k chassis, 6k appliance, and 7k chassis. Words can not describe how sharp this woman is. If you ever get the opportunity to sit down with her and discuss FortiGate architecture, why they do what they do, and how they work in general you will be in for a treat.

The Fabric Is Growing

The direction the company is taking with the security fabric is incredible. When the fabric first came out I was skeptical. I thought to myself, “ahh another fabric/API/thing that is never going to be used. Well, I was wrong. Fortinet has taken this initiative and ran with it and the things that are coming out of the developer’s labs are just getting better and better. Automated responses, incident response readiness, it’s all going to be great.