The security vendor has an interesting take on BYOD and with a substantial installed base and strong growth in the Indian market, particularly in Tier 2 cities, it’s poised to influence how Indian companies manage this trend. By Prashant L Rao
The ongoing trend of Bring Your Own Device or BYOD is going strong in the country. In the large enterprise, IT heads have adopted a device-centric approach using the vendor’s own tools or an agent-driven approach. Here the players are the likes of RIM, Samsung, Juniper etc. However, in the medium enterprise, where employees are using their personal devices to access, at the very least, corporate email, and often, many other corporate IT assets, there isn’t an easy way out. These organizations, typically, do not provide the employees with devices or mandate a particular list of allowed smartphones/tablets. Here, it’s more ad hoc with employees bringing a wide variety of devices into the organization. In such cases, a device-centric approach may not always work. An agent-based approach can work. However, Fortinet which is, among other things, a strong player in the UTM space, is advocating a third way—one that’s network based.
“We offer rules-based control at the perimeter UTM that’s based on packet inspection. It works for both LAN and WLAN connections. The UTM acts as a wireless controller for access policies, rules etc and it enforces whatever policies that you have formulated for the LAN policies on the WLAN as well,” commented Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director, Fortinet India & SAARC.
The company’s been on a roll with an installed base of 20,000 installations in India. “In the last quarter we beat Juniper to become third in the overall security appliance market behind Cisco & Check Point,” said Raman.
The company had a good year in 2011 wherein it grew by 32% in India. Along the way it secured Parliament, all the bhavans, the MHA, six state data centers, the Aadhaar DC and it recently won the contract for the upgrade of Chandrayaan 1 and GPRS satellites at ISRO.
A lot of this success is being driven by tremendous growth in Tier 2 cities like Cochin and Ahmedabad.
Fortinet is well placed to deliver a network-based approach to managing BYOD since it’s UTM devices are widely adopted and, with FortiOS 4.3 and above, these come with wireless controller functionality. The company’s urging its clients to ‘control things at the network level rather than on the device’.
“Just upgrade to FortiOS 4.3 and deploy thin access points across the campus. These work in the 5 GHz range and they can cover a wider area than thick access points. They cascade, in turn, to a thick access point,” said Raman explaining the vendor’s modus operandi.
Wireless is big business at Fortinet which did over $20 mn in wireless last year and is gunning for $50 mn of business in this area in 2012.
As of now, 25% of the company’s existing customers have upgraded to FortiOS 4.3 and for new sales it’s already there. “Right now, they are looking at whether they can save the cost of a wireless access controller. Once they see that they can control BYOD with it, it becomes an advantage for them. DLP, WAN acceleration etc are inbuilt,” said Raman.
Today, Fortinet supports Windows, Symbian and iOS devices. Android support is in the works.
BYOD adoption in India today involves a combination of laptops (higher education), iPads (BFSI) and smartphones. Adoption has been considerable in manufacturing, BFSI and education.
Interestingly, the users are all aboard and worryingly, Indian users don’t care if the company suffers as long as they get to access personal applications on their devices. Fortinet did a survey of BYOD users worldwide including 209 from India (in full time employment aged 21 to 31). It found that though people wanted to use their personal devices, the task of securing these still lay with the company. Users were quite willing to circumvent security policies to get their work done on their own devices, more so than the global norm.
It’s clear that enterprises, not the largest but still of considerable size, need to address BYOD and quickly before one or more Indian companies follow Sony and LinkedIn and Yahoo! in the halls of the hacked. Fortinet is ready and willing to help its customers in this endeavor as are other security vendors. Having said that, it’s approach is interesting and should pay dividends not only with its existing clientèle but also prove to be a differentiator as it goes about acquiring new ones.
