Fortinet enters SIEM market with US$28m acquisition

Fortinet is ramping up its SIEM capabilities with the $28 million acquisition of AccelOps, a leading provider of network security monitoring and analytics solutions.

The acquisition, for US$28 million in cash with an additional $4 million to be paid subject to future performance, will see AccelOps solutions become FortiSIEM, and part of Fortinet’s recently announced Security Fabric.

The deal provides Fortinet with entry into the US$2 billion SIEM market, which Gartner has forecast to grow to $2.9 billion by 2019.

Ken Xie, Fortinet chief executive, says 60% of all security breaches result in stolen data within minutes of the breach and go undetected due to ineffective threat monitoring and security event correlation.

“In addition, the lack of a holistic view across organisations’ entire distributed, multi-vendor networks and the growing quantity and complexity of threat information create big data security challenges,” Xie says.

He says the acquisition of AccelOps will enable Fortinet to extend its Security Fabric, and address those issues, combining security and compliance monitoring with advanced analytics for multi-vendor security solutions, enabling automated and actionable security intelligence from IoT to the cloud.

AccelOp’s security operations centre and network operations centre capabilities will be used to power managed security service providers and Fortinet support services, Fortinet says.

Those services will include a new subscription service, FortiCare 360 Support, providing automated security and performance audits of customer’s specific security infrastructure and advisories to help prevent unplanned disruptions and prevent problems before they impact performance and service delivery.