With the explosion of network edges, ranging from wide and local area networks to cloud, data center and even the home, the attack surface for cybersecurity threats has expanded as well. To help address this growing challenge, Fortinet Inc. has just announced version 7.0 of its FortiOS flagship operating system.

The latest release focuses on Fortinet’s ability to deliver security protection for networks, endpoints and clouds by leveraging 300 new features.

“It’s big news because it allows FortiOS to sit at any edge across the network, whether it be the WAN edge, cloud edge, data center edge,” said John Maddison (pictured), chief marketing officer and executive vice president of products at Fortinet. “We’ve extended it into cloud edge with SASE in this release. It gives our customers the ability to really protect the attack surface from the endpoint to the cloud.”

Maddison spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed how the rise of nation state hacking has led enterprises to reevaluate security solutions and the need for a platform-based approach that empowers organizations to secure and simplify IT infrastructure. (* Disclosure below.)

Scary threat landscape

Fortinet’s release comes at a critical time when organizations have been forced to grapple with rising ransomware threats and major breaches, such as the SolarWinds intrusion. Two months after the SolarWinds attack was first reported, the breach continues to generate headlines, including recent news that suspected nation state hackers may have potentially compromised data on thousands of U.S. government employees.

“The recent SolarWinds incident has made people look really closely at their cybersecurity strategy and architecture,” Maddison noted. “They got onto a device that had privilege access across a lot of servers and applications. That’s very scary, the threat landscape around state sponsored.”

Connected devices increasingly represent the front line of defense against attacks, which has elevated the importance of edge security. This scenario has increased the complexity within enterprise infrastructures, leading enterprises to turn toward platform solutions that can manage a wide range of data consumption models.

“It can’t be just an endpoint platform; it can’t be just a network security platform or just a cloud platform, because you’re only seeing, defending and protecting a part of the overall digital experience,” Maddison said. “It’s going to be very important to be able to provide a platform that sits across all of your devices and users, across your whole network, including new networks like 5G and across the applications and in the cloud. We’ve been building that platform on our FortiOS operating system.”

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

Photo: SiliconANGLE