VIRTUAL DESKTOP TOOLS
Fortinet | August 18, 2022
Fortinet a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced accelerated momentum of Fortinet Universal ZTNA and its ability to provide secure access for any user anywhere, whether they are remote or in the office. In fact, according to the latest Gartner report on enterprise network equipment market share, Fortinet is among the highest five global ZTNA vendors, with the fastest growing revenue of any vendor quarter-over-quarter from 4Q21-1Q22 and year-over-year from 1Q21-1Q22.1 Fortinet attributes this growth to its differentiated approach to ZTNA that supports secure application access for any user in any location, lower total cost of ownership, more seamless transition from VPN, and integration with the Fortinet Security Fabric, including Fortinet Secure SD-WAN.
ZTNA emerges as a top solution to implement Zero Trust principles
Organizations of all sizes are adopting Zero Trust as a corporate security strategy to enable digital acceleration, support remote and hybrid work, and reduce risk. According to Gartner, “60% of organizations will embrace Zero Trust as a starting point for security by 2025. More than half will fail to realize the benefits.”2 While transitioning from implicit trust to an explicit Zero Trust model is a top strategic concern, most organizations – over 80% according to a January 2022 Zero Trust survey from Fortinet – have found it difficult to execute. ZTNA has emerged as a top technology adopted by organizations as a first step to implementing zero trust principles to the corporate network.
Secure access for any user anywhere with Fortinet Universal ZTNA
At an increasing rate, organizations seeking to reduce their risk profile by building a zero trust architecture are turning to Fortinet Universal ZTNA. Key benefits of Fortinet’s solution include:
Consistent user experience in all work locations: Unlike cloud-only ZTNA, Fortinet Universal ZTNA delivers universal enforcement and the same user experience and security policies whether employees are located in densely populated offices, working remotely from home, or on the road.
Easy transition from VPN to ZTNA: Because VPN and ZTNA are managed by the same integrated client from Fortinet FortiClient organizations can transition application access seamlessly and at their own pace.
Existing Fortinet customers can immediately access ZTNA: Customers with existing FortiGate and FortiClient investments already have what they need to start applying Fortinet Universal ZTNA, an unlicensed feature.
ZTNA integrated with SD-WAN: Fortinet is the only vendor delivering ZTNA, SD-WAN, and enterprise-grade security that is integrated by a single operating system to more effectively support secure application access and application steering. All three SD-WAN for connectivity, ZTNA for secure access, and enterprise-grade security for traffic inspection and protection can be configured, orchestrated, and managed using the same centralized console.
Powerful networking and security convergence enabled by FortiOS everywhere: With Fortinet Universal ZTNA, Fortinet continues its legacy of delivering solutions that converge networking and security across its FortiGate platform. This convergence is powered by a single operating system—FortiOS—across all FortiGate form factors, including appliances, virtual machines, container solutions, SASE, and cloud deployments, to deliver coordinated security policies and consistent user experience.
“Fortinet Universal ZTNA delivers the most complete support for work-from-anywhere by delivering a universal approach to ZTNA that is consistent on-prem, in the cloud or as a service via SASE. Because cloud-only ZTNA solutions aren’t able to adequately support in-office workers and do so at a high cost, we’re seeing an increasing adoption of Fortinet Universal ZTNA to support today’s hybrid workforce.”
John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet
Customer and Partner Validation of Fortinet Universal ZTNA
Organizations around the world rely on Fortinet Universal ZTNA to improve secure access to applications. Current Fortinet customers highlight the value of Fortinet’s offering:
“We are drawn to Fortinet Universal ZTNA because it will allow us to control application access for both on-campus and remote users. Having ZTNA on-prem and in the cloud means we’re able to better ensure our hybrid workforce has access to the applications they need while keeping our network more secure and easier to manage and control with less resources. The ability to use the Fortinet gear we already have to apply ZTNA enforcement is really appealing.”
- Tal David, Networking and Security Global Manager at Sapiens
“We’re currently migrating away from our existing VPN solution to FortiClient with connections through our FortiGates. Because Fortinet delivers several security capabilities from a single agent, we will be removing multiple other security agents. And because the ZTNA agent is a part of FortiClient, we will more easily control our shift from traditional VPN to an easier to manage ZTNA with a more seamless end-user experience. Being able to implement granular control of user-to-application access at our own pace will make a big difference in our plans to reduce security risk in our network.”
- JP DiCicco, IT Infrastructure Operations Manager at RES Americas
“We were really attracted to the Security Fabric concept of the Fortinet solution and how those products all talk to each other and react in real-time based on their observance of threats. That along with the common management interface for the whole suite of products made it a really easy decision for us. Because of the integrated nature of Fortinet’s products, adding on ZTNA to further improve our security posture with granular access control is seamless.”
- Colby Cousens, IT Director at Town of Danvers, Massachusetts
Fortinet’s partners are also leveraging Fortinet Universal ZTNA to support their customers:
“Fortinet’s dedication to consistently converging networking and security via FortiGate allows us to deliver immense value to customers. Having access to next-gen firewalling, SD-WAN and ZTNA all in one location and on one operating system that’s consistent whether on-prem, in the cloud, or as a service means easier management, better user experience, and a higher security posture.”
- Marc Jabian, Cybersecurity Practice Manager at Netsync
About Fortinet
Fortinet makes possible a digital world that we can always trust through its mission to protect people, devices, and data everywhere. This is why the world’s largest enterprises, service providers, and government organizations choose Fortinet to securely accelerate their digital journey. The Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protections across the entire digital attack surface, securing critical devices, data, applications, and connections from the data center to the cloud to the home office. Ranking #1 in the most security appliances shipped worldwide, more than 580,000 customers trust Fortinet to protect their businesses. And the Fortinet NSE Training Institute, an initiative of Fortinet’s Training Advancement Agenda (TAA), provides one of the largest and broadest training programs in the industry to make cyber training and new career opportunities available to everyone.
Read More
SERVER VIRTUALIZATION
Citrix | August 05, 2022
Forced by the pandemic to provide employees with access to the systems and information they needed to work from home, IT organizations around the world turned to traditional technologies like Virtual Private Networks (VPN). And they worked. But as the world moves to hybrid work, 96 percent of IT leaders who participated in a recent global survey conducted by Gartner Peer Insights on behalf of Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS), say they no longer cut it. And they’re rethinking their approach.
A Seismic Change
Hybrid models have radically changed where and how work gets done – and even who does it. Of the organizations who participated in the Citrix poll:
96 percent have a hybrid work policy or allow both fully remote and hybrid work
85 percent say their workforce is more geographically dispersed than it was two years ago
75 percent have seen an increase in the number of seasonal, contract, or freelance workers
A Major Miss
When it comes to supporting these changes, respondents say the solutions they put in place to enable remote work fall short in the following areas:
Fail to protect against additional security risks posed by employees working from anywhere (96 percent)
Create a digital divide between in-office and remote employees (63 percent)
Don’t provide a consistent user experience (46 percent)
Hinder efficient collaboration among distributed employees (46 percent)
Don’t support bring-your-own-device initiatives (33 percent)
Difficult to scale and manage (25 percent)
A Strategic Shift
And they are increasing their investments in technologies that allow them to provide a simpler, more consistent and secure experience for employees regardless of where they work, including:
Virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) (69 percent)
Virtual apps and desktops (56 percent)
Desktops as a Service (DaaS) (42 percent)
Zero trust network access (34 percent)
A Layered Approach
VPN remains the most popular solution to support remote work. But as the Citrix research reveals, it’s not enough to enable safe and productive hybrid work on its own. According to the poll, 87 percent of respondents using VPN have implemented at least one other solution to close the gaps, including:
VDI (69 percent)
Virtual Apps and Desktops (49 percent)
DaaS (39 percent)
Desired Results
And in doing so, they’re achieving their goal. When asked to identify the top three benefits their hybrid work solutions provide, participants in the Citrix poll said they:
Provide layered protection for all devices on the network, including unmanaged and BYOD
Create an equitable work experience by providing employees with consistent and reliable access to applications and data regardless of where they are working
Provide layered protection and consistent security management for all applications
“Hybrid work is the future of work, Innovative organizations recognize this and are reimagining the solutions used to support it so they can deliver it today.”
Tim Minahan, Executive Vice President of Strategy, Citrix
Citrix provides a complete digital workspace platform that companies of all sizes can use to enable secure work. With Citrix, employees can work where and how they prefer, and IT can be confident their information and devices remain safe. Click here to learn more about Citrix solutions and the value they can provide.
About Citrix
Citrix builds the secure, unified digital workspace technology that helps organizations unlock human potential and deliver a consistent workspace experience wherever work needs to get done. With Citrix, users get a seamless work experience and IT has a unified platform to secure, manage, and monitor diverse technologies in complex cloud environments.
Read More
SERVER VIRTUALIZATION
Napatech | July 06, 2022
Napatech™ the leading provider of programmable Smart Network Interface Cards (SmartNICs) used for Data Processing Unit (DPU) and Infrastructure Processing Unit (IPU) services in telecom, cloud, enterprise, cybersecurity and financial applications worldwide, today announced a set of new SmartNIC capabilities that enable standard, unmodified applications in edge and core data centers to benefit from offloaded and accelerated compute and networking functions.
As enterprises, communications service providers and cloud data center operators deploy virtualized applications and services in edge and core data centers, they increasingly leverage workload-specific coprocessors to offload functions such as Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), storage, networking and infrastructure services from general-purpose server CPUs. This architectural approach not only maximizes the availability of server compute resources for running applications and services but also improves system-level performance and energy efficiency by running the offloaded workloads on devices optimized for those specific tasks such as programmable SmartNICs, also known as Data Processing Units (DPUs) or Infrastructure Processing Units (IPUs).
Thanks to this offload trend as well as an acceleration in global data center deployments, programmable SmartNICs represent the fastest-growing segment of the NIC market, with a Total Available Market (TAM) forecasted to reach $3.8B/year by 2026 according to Omdia.
To maximize the portability of their software and to accelerate their time-to-market, developers of cloud applications and services incorporate industry-standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) and drivers within their software. Data center operators therefore need to be able to select offload solutions that are compatible with the relevant standards, to avoid having to create custom, vendor-specific versions of their software. The latest upgrade to Napatech's Link-Virtualization™ software, release 4.4, addresses this challenge by incorporating networking and virtual switching features that implement full support for the relevant open standards, while delivering best-in-class performance and functionality.
Specifically, Link-Virtualization now supports a fully hardware-offloaded implementation of the Virtio 1.1 Input/Output (I/O) virtualization framework for Linux, including the standard kernel NIC interface, which means that guest Virtual Machines (VMs) do not require a custom or proprietary driver. Link-Virtualization also supports the open-standard Data Plane Development Kit (DPDK) fast-path running in guest VMs to maximize the performance of functions such as Open Virtual Switch (OVS). Link-Virtualization is also fully compatible with OpenStack, allowing a seamless integration into cloud data center environments worldwide.
Other new features incorporated in Link-Virtualization include IPv6 VxLAN tunneling, RPM-based setup for OpenStack Packstack, configurable Maximum Transmission Unit (MTU), live migration on packed ring, port-based Quality of Service (QoS) egress policing and more. The software is available on Napatech's portfolio of SmartNICs, powered by AMD (Xilinx) and Intel FPGAs, that span 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 25 Gbps, 40 Gbps, 50 Gbps and 100 Gbps port speeds.
As one example of the industry-leading performance delivered by Link-Virtualization, the complete offload of the OVS data path onto the SmartNIC means that only a single host CPU core is required to run the OVS control plane while delivering industry-leading throughput of 55 million packets per second for Port-to-VM-to-Port (PVP) traffic and 130 million packets per second for Port-to-Port (PTP) traffic. Reclaiming host CPU cores previously required to run OVS and making them available to run applications and services leads to a significant reduction in the number of servers required to support a given workload or user base. This in turn drives significant reductions in overall data center CAPEX and OPEX. It also results in lower system-level power consumption and improved energy efficiency for the edge or cloud data center. To aid in the estimation of cost and energy savings for specific use cases, Napatech provides an online ROI calculator, which data center operators can use to analyze their projected savings.
"Napatech's Link-Virtualization software enables data center operators to optimize the performance of their networking infrastructure in a completely standards-compatible environment, which maximizes their flexibility in selecting applications, Besides full support for standard APIs, the solution also incorporates critical operational features such as Receive Side Scaling (RSS) for efficiently distributing network traffic to multiple VMs and Virtual Data Path Acceleration (vDPA), which enables the live migration of running workloads to and from any host, whether or not a SmartNIC is present."
Napatech CMO Jarrod J.S. Siket
About Napatech
Napatech is the leading supplier of programmable FPGA-based SmartNIC solutions used in telecom, cloud, enterprise, cybersecurity and financial applications worldwide. Through commercial-grade software suites integrated with robust, high-performance hardware, Napatech accelerates telecom, networking and security workloads to deliver best-in-class system-level performance while maximizing the availability of server compute resources for running applications and services.
Read More