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Management

7.2.3
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Management

The FortiManager unit is the centralized management platform for many Fortinet products. Not only does it provide a single pane to manage switches, access points, security appliances, and so on, but it also helps with compliance reporting and network automation for secured wireless and campus switching deployments.

The average enterprise today has too many networking and security point products. As a result, you probably have many management consoles for security operations and others for network operations. Having different tools for managing security products increases risk, inefficiency, and cost—both in terms of operational and capital expenditures. Having a central management for many of the Fortinet security and network platforms, as well as Security Fabric-partner products, allows you to unify and efficiently manage configurations and policies across different devices. The open and extensible architecture of fabric connectors also enables an “integrated approach” to securing the enterprise and the sharing of threat intelligence with all fabric elements that you might already have. Device life-cycle management of network and security products enable scripted and automated provisioning, firewall AP and switch updates, migration, and deprovisioning easily.

The following figure shows the FortiSwitch Manager GUI.

Based on Fortinetʼs extensive experience in the security industry, Fortinet has integrated the most important security “best practices” into a series of tests that can be run on Fortinet technology. Consequently, you now have a quantifiable measure of your security posture. By charting your security scores over time, the FortiManager unit helps you easily see if your security posture is improving or declining, discern trends, and compare your security score with your peers. The FortiManager unit, working with the FortiAnalyzer unit, tracks and stores security ratings over time.

The FortiManager unit reduces administration and workload costs with smart features, such as device discovery, device group creation by administration domain, audit, and management of complex architectures. You can quickly deploy hundreds of switches and APs in your campus, thousands of edge locations, trigger changes to entire groups of devices, and consistently define security and SD-branch policies throughout your campus and branch environments.

The FortiManager unit manages FortiGate devices and any subordinate FortiSwitch, FortiAP, and FortiExtender units and provides signature updates to FortiMail, FortiSandbox, and FortiClient units. It provides enterprise-grade high availability and integration, automating backups to up to five nodes with streamlined software and security updates for all managed devices.

Finally, the FortiManager unit facilitates rapid or automated response using FortiOS automation stitches. An automation stitch is a simple way to define actions on triggers. Think of it as “if this happens, then do that” in a single console. The FortiManager unit is making next-generation infrastructure management less painful for the MIS and IT teams with these automation-ready tools, not only removing the chance of error or omission due to manual processing, but also reducing demand on sparse resources.

The FortiManager unit can manage up to 10,000 devices and VDOMs and up to 120,000 FortiClient agents from a single FortiManager interface (depending on the model). The FortiManager unit can segregate the management of large deployments easily and securely by grouping devices and agents into geographic or functional administrative domains (ADOMs). The FortiManager product selection is based on the number of Fortinet devices it can manage and the FortiManager unit’s storage capacity.

Management

The FortiManager unit is the centralized management platform for many Fortinet products. Not only does it provide a single pane to manage switches, access points, security appliances, and so on, but it also helps with compliance reporting and network automation for secured wireless and campus switching deployments.

The average enterprise today has too many networking and security point products. As a result, you probably have many management consoles for security operations and others for network operations. Having different tools for managing security products increases risk, inefficiency, and cost—both in terms of operational and capital expenditures. Having a central management for many of the Fortinet security and network platforms, as well as Security Fabric-partner products, allows you to unify and efficiently manage configurations and policies across different devices. The open and extensible architecture of fabric connectors also enables an “integrated approach” to securing the enterprise and the sharing of threat intelligence with all fabric elements that you might already have. Device life-cycle management of network and security products enable scripted and automated provisioning, firewall AP and switch updates, migration, and deprovisioning easily.

The following figure shows the FortiSwitch Manager GUI.

Based on Fortinetʼs extensive experience in the security industry, Fortinet has integrated the most important security “best practices” into a series of tests that can be run on Fortinet technology. Consequently, you now have a quantifiable measure of your security posture. By charting your security scores over time, the FortiManager unit helps you easily see if your security posture is improving or declining, discern trends, and compare your security score with your peers. The FortiManager unit, working with the FortiAnalyzer unit, tracks and stores security ratings over time.

The FortiManager unit reduces administration and workload costs with smart features, such as device discovery, device group creation by administration domain, audit, and management of complex architectures. You can quickly deploy hundreds of switches and APs in your campus, thousands of edge locations, trigger changes to entire groups of devices, and consistently define security and SD-branch policies throughout your campus and branch environments.

The FortiManager unit manages FortiGate devices and any subordinate FortiSwitch, FortiAP, and FortiExtender units and provides signature updates to FortiMail, FortiSandbox, and FortiClient units. It provides enterprise-grade high availability and integration, automating backups to up to five nodes with streamlined software and security updates for all managed devices.

Finally, the FortiManager unit facilitates rapid or automated response using FortiOS automation stitches. An automation stitch is a simple way to define actions on triggers. Think of it as “if this happens, then do that” in a single console. The FortiManager unit is making next-generation infrastructure management less painful for the MIS and IT teams with these automation-ready tools, not only removing the chance of error or omission due to manual processing, but also reducing demand on sparse resources.

The FortiManager unit can manage up to 10,000 devices and VDOMs and up to 120,000 FortiClient agents from a single FortiManager interface (depending on the model). The FortiManager unit can segregate the management of large deployments easily and securely by grouping devices and agents into geographic or functional administrative domains (ADOMs). The FortiManager product selection is based on the number of Fortinet devices it can manage and the FortiManager unit’s storage capacity.