Fortinet, a leading cybersecurity corporation and IT Vortex partner, highlights IT Vortex’s invulnerable approach to multi-layered security, multifaced protection, and innovative billing.
Lou Corriero, ITV’s Vice President of Business Development, describes how IT Vortex sets itself apart by providing its clients with a turnkey solution. He says, “We offer them hardware, maintenance, and software licensing. What differentiates us as a cloud provider is the security that we layer on top of that turnkey solution. We built our company strategy on securing customers from the endpoint to the client site to the cloud.”
IT Vortex’s cloud-hosting platform runs on a VMware stack in two U.S. data centers. For their multinational clients, they provide virtual desktops, virtual private networks (VPNs), and software-defined-wide-area networking (SD-WAN).
Since 2008, ITV has been leveraging Fortinet solutions to keep their clients’ data secure. Corriero emphasizes the importance of having a solid strategy for threat containment and remediation. He explains, “Fortinet has always remained a step or two ahead, which is key for us. We have been using Fortinet solutions for 14 years, and (knock on wood) have not had a single breach that was due to Fortinet policies or filtering.”
IT Vortex’s clients can leverage Fortinet’s intrusion prevention system (IPS), DNS filtering, data loss prevention (DLP), and other capabilities. Corriero emphasizes that Fortinet’s ability to do a Layer 2 IPsec VPN and ease of management were key factors in the company’s choice of Fortinet. He explains, “The FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls integrate tightly with the VMware platform. They are a natural extension of the VMware stack, yet they are robust and capable firewalls. The Fortinet management tools give us much more granular control of security than what is available through products built into VMware.”
Every client in the IT Vortex cloud has at least one dedicated FortiGate virtual firewall filtering its north-south traffic. IT Vortex also uses FortiGate-VM NGFWs for micro-segmentation, filtering east-west traffic to isolate resources in case of a breach. Corriero says that clients are frequently so impressed with the Fortinet-based infrastructure that they ask IT Vortex to replace their on-premises IT infrastructure with Fortinet solutions. “We see a progression,” Corriero explains. “After the firewalls come more infrastructure like switching and then sometimes access points.”
When it comes to simplifying billing, Corriero states, “Other providers tend to ‘a la carte’ customers to death. They are initially quoted one price, but then they have sticker shock when they get the bill and see everything else that is added on. IT Vortex offers our cloud services at a flat rate upfront, and that pricing does not change unless the client intentionally adds more services.” For each firewall, IT Vortex’s spend in terms of consumption points is based on the number of CPUs and VDOMS (virtual domain object models) in the firewall and the features that the firewall is using.
IT Vortex will begin to start offering the SOC (security operations center) as a service add-on soon, which recently became available in the Flex-VM program. Corriero explains, “That is a full, Fortinet-managed SOC service that will act in parallel with our own event monitoring. It will provide a second layer of alerts if there is some type of anomalous activity and will give even more eyes on the logging and events management.”
About IT Vortex – IT Vortex is your end-to-end service provider, founded from the mindset of experienced IT engineers, not salespeople. Our years of experience in the IT field contribute to our top-notch services portfolio. ITV maximizes your investment in technology by avoiding the evaluation and proof of concept phases. We have surpassed the trial-and-error stages to construct our industry-leading portfolio of technology vendors and partners. We only sell the solutions we know and believe in, not sales pitches full of empty promises. ITV is partnered with leading technology solution vendors like VMWare, EMC, Mitel, Microsoft, and Dell. Our top-notch portfolio of software and hardware vendors empowers your organization to achieve all its goals.
