Fortinet brings AI help to enterprise security teams

Fortinet has joined a growing list of enterprise networking players to build an AI-based assistant to help customers fight off cybersecurity threats.

Fortinet Advisor is aimed at helping security operations teams make more informed decisions, respond to threats faster, and simplify routine and complex tasks. The AI-based assistant will be available as part of Fortinet’s FortiSIEM security information and event management platform and FortiSOAR security orchestration, automation, and response product.

Most security teams are challenged by the volume of alerts that demand time to identify, prioritize, investigate, and remediate, and this volume can overwhelm staff who are already strained by the industry-wide cyber skills shortage, wrote David Finger, Fortinet’s director of product marketing, in a blog about the new Advisor.

A second challenge is the growing number of sophisticated attacks that evade detection by utilizing legitimate credentials, devices, or services coopted for malicious purposes. New attacks also utilize multi-stage processes that are difficult to see using security tools that don’t work together as an integrated system or provide a consolidated view.

“This is where generative AI’s interactive, natural language interaction can significantly improve security operations effectiveness by making events, alerts, and incidents easier to understand and translate natural language requests into the technical queries required to execute complex database queries and automatically build rich reports,” Finger wrote.

Fortinet Advisor lets SecOps teams directly interact with AI systems to enhance threat detection, analysis, and response, generate reports, build playbooks, and remediate vulnerable and compromised systems, Finger stated.

Advisor expands Fortinet’s AI portfolio, which includes FortiAIOps, FortiEDR, FortiNDR, and FortiAnalyzer.

Most recently, Fortinet released two high-speed, next generation firewalls. The firewalls support Fortinet’s AI-Powered Security Services, which blend AI and machine-learning technologies to make customers aware of cyber threats and act on protecting resources much more quickly, Fortinet stated.

A number of vendors, including Cisco, Juniper, Extreme and Arista, have unveiled AI-based assistants designed to help enterprise customers better assess security situations, eliminate errors and automate complex tasks.

Cisco, for example, added an AI Assistant for Security that will be implemented as part of the vendor’s cloud-based Firewall Management Center and Cisco Defense Orchestrator services. Cisco’s Firewall Management Center is a centralized platform for configuring, monitoring, troubleshooting and controlling Cisco Firepower Next-Generation Firewalls. The orchestrator platform lets customers centrally manage, control and automate security policies across multiple cloud-native security systems.