Fortinet Acquires Network Monitoring and Remediation Innovator Panopta

Today we announced the acquisition of Panopta, and together with Fortinet, its cloud-based solution will deliver a complete picture of every service, network device, and application in any deployment to even further improve customers’ hybrid network infrastructure security and performance – whether container, cloud, on-prem, or hybrid. Fortinet’s Security Fabric, combined with Panopta’s scalable network monitoring and diagnostics platform, enables Fortinet to offer the most comprehensive network and security operations management solution for enterprises.

Additional capabilities will include:

• Unified Monitoring and automated Incident Management that reduces response and resolution times for NOC teams and, in turn, helps exceed SLAs.
• Over 50 global points of presence (PoPS) with low-cost probes to simulate application performance and latency that may impact end user experience (also known as synthetic transaction monitoring).
• Cloud native monitoring for Kubernetes and PaaS workloads in AWS and Azure.
• Fully configurable alerting workflows with out-of-the-box integrations for third-party enterprise and modern communication tools.
• Another first-class partner-friendly service offering that remains true to Fortinet’s ongoing commitment to its valued partners.

Uniting NOC and SOC to Enable IT Operations Orchestration 

Both Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) teams respond to incidents and rely on the insights that their infrastructure monitoring platforms provide. Maintaining the integrity and availability of both internal business services and external facing customer services is critical for both teams. Given the increasingly overlapping scope and responsibilities of these teams, enterprises are taking steps to bringing their NOC and SOC together. 

NOC and SOC teams are the frontlines of defense in many organizations. Having these teams operationalize a single source of truth for what’s happening inside their infrastructure ensures lower costs, increased efficiency, and optimized resources. 

Being able to ingest at scale, and more importantly, trust log and event data from every piece of infrastructure in the stack is mission critical for security practitioners. With Panopta, log data from databases, DNS, servers, cloud platforms, and more can be ingested and used to fuel SIEM tools, identify malicious behavior, and alert security and IT teams with the rich data they need to correlate and respond to threats.

In addition to the richness of security-centric data, Panopta surfaces warning signs and leading indicators on availability, performance, security, and service quality of applications and infrastructure. This means that SASE services, email, security analytics, VPNs, and web application firewalls can easily and continuously be monitored in real time to turn incident response from reactive to proactive. 

Panopta offers enterprise customers a path to meeting and exceeding their SLA objectives by bringing both NOC and SOC teams together through a single, trustworthy source of insights and actionable data to deliver better service to their customers. It is essential for Operations (Ops) teams to have full stack visibility and automated management of the health of an enterprise network, including servers, network devices, containers, applications, databases, virtual appliances, and cloud infrastructure. 

Enterprise IT teams are increasingly reliant on platforms that prioritize both customers’ and employee experience. If services fail or become degraded, Panopta provides detailed, actionable diagnostics automatically about those incidents to Ops teams. By contextualizing alerts and utilizing automated remediation through Panopta, Ops professionals can significantly reduce MTTD and MTTR. If issues do arise, Automated Runbooks can be deployed to both resolve issues without a team member having to step in, as well as run important diagnostics as soon as an event is detected. 

Proactive Monitoring & Triage

Enterprise cloud data management leader Informatica needed a single platform to do continuous performance testing that could seamlessly scale as they add new product lines and customers. Adoption of Panopta provided their IT team with better insight into existing infrastructure. With the added bonus of Panopta’s centralized monitoring, Informatica’s NOC has been able to better triage incidents as they occur, causing a decrease in the time it takes to resolve incidents. 

More teams are able to easily track SLAs across different product lines, and increase the performance customers see, strengthening Informatica’s products and services. As Informatica has continued to expand their environments and use of Panopta, they’re finding that they can offer their customers higher SLAs with confidence. As Ani Patel, Director of DevOps for Cloud MDM said, “A monitoring solution is basically your eyes. Unless somebody tells you exactly what's happening in your systems, I don't think you can promise any solid SLAs. Panopta is going to be one of the differentiators for Informatica.”

And customers like Armor empower their support teams by enabling them to monitor their customer deployments for potential issues and take advantage of integrations with the JIRA to expedite ticketing and assignment. Panopta is able to create tickets in JIRA automatically, meaning Armor’s team can quickly triage incidents and begin resolving issues right away.

Made for Service Providers

Panopta’s platform is built to be partner friendly, empowering MSSPs and value-add partners to easily integrate the multi-tenant solution into their own offering and quickly add value to their end customers. Role-based access control capabilities allow MSPs and MSSPs to separate their infrastructure by team, location, or customer to keep deployments organized, without limiting the data that can be accessed. Providers are able to manage customers at any scale with Panopta’s holistic IT monitoring and incident management platform.

With Panopta, providers can also get their customers up and running quickly with features like:

• Templates for servers, databases, and network devices so you can apply automated monitoring configuration with just a click
• Auto-discovery to pull in infrastructure devices and virtual machines into Panopta for you, saving your team time
• Single sign-on to easily move between customer deployments or internal infrastructure
• Automation built directly into your incident management systems and processes to resolve issues faster
• Custom status pages and dashboards
  

Learn more about how this acquisition strengthens Fortinet’s security portfolio and delivers the most comprehensive Security-driven Networking platform on the market. 

Find out how the Fortinet Security Fabric platform delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization’s entire digital infrastructure.

Current partners can visit the Partner Portal to find important updates from Fortinet and our partner program.