During AT&T’s massive frame-relay outage in 1999, Kevin Kealy was an engineer behind the scenes fixing the crash for the far-reaching telecommunications system. At the time, AT&T’s senior vice president and chief security officer, Edward Amoroso, decided to make significant changes.

“[Amoroso] decided he wanted vendor diversity — we went to Cisco on the edge and Juniper in the core — and, of course, the automatic patch push was disabled,” said Kealy, recalling AT&T’s early partnerships with the networking providers.

Such experiences helped Kealy shape his leadership role at information technology services provider Ingram Micro Inc., where he currently serves as chief information security officer, a role he’s held since 2016. Kealy spoke with Lisa Martin (@LuccaZara) and Peter Burris (@plburris), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the Fortinet Accelerate event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the evolution of network security and the importance of partnerships.

Collaboration at its core

Now a Fortinet Inc. user, the partnership was an opportunity for Kealy to bring vendor diversity to Ingram Micro’s table, pulling the work into a centralized console. As a consequence, Fortinet services have helped improve work efficiencies in Ingram Micro’s virtualized environments.

“It was an easy purchasing decision for me, number one on the technology side, number one on the partnership side,” Kealy said, prioritizing Fortinet’s perks on both fronts.

Furthering vendor diversity at Ingram Micro, Kealy currently oversees seven other groups within the company now using a business intelligence and security tool for Splunk, in conjunction with Fortinet’s advanced firewall app FortiGate. Kealy sees it as a give-and-take approach for the company, thanks to the additional analytics insights FortiGate offers.

“I’m very excited about the new fabric,” Kealy said. “One of the first things when I got to Ingram is that I realized I couldn’t see the edges into the bottom of my network. So I started to increase the visibility with a combination of the Fortinet product suite … able to get the edge-to-edge top-to-bottom visibility.”

Fortinet has been an effective and low-risk choice for protecting IT infrastructure, according to Kealy, who uses Fortinet gear for the Ingram chief executive office and the staff who work from home.

“As a customer, Fortinet is always there for me. I know that I can just call them and within five minutes I get the right resources on the phone,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of Fortinet Accelerate 2018. (* Disclosure: Ingram Micro Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Ingram Micro nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE