15 years on the market
Fortinet recently celebrated its 15th anniversary. The IT company was founded in November 2000 by Ken Xie, Chairman and CEO, who recognized early on that firewalls and VPNs alone are no longer sufficient to comprehensively protect a network from attacks.
Two years after the company was founded, the first Fortinet-Fortinet supplied products to Switzerland and carried out customer installations for the first time at the beginning of 2003. This led to the hiring of the first Swiss employee, Franz Kaiser, in 2004, who now heads Fortinet's agendas as Regional Vice President Alps and CSEE. "We have managed to increase both our revenues and headcount in Switzerland more than tenfold over the past decade. But it is also thanks to our constant striving for innovation and the ongoing optimization of our service portfolio that we are now a recognized leader in the security environment - both internationally and nationally," Kaiser sums up.
This review of the company's development was followed at the anniversary event by an outlook on future challenges and long-term trends in the IT security industry. Hannes LubichProfessor at the University of Applied Sciences Northwestern Switzerland, identified six key developments that will continue over the next 15 years:
- new computer paradigms
- Increasing network complexity
- Big Data analyses
- Resilience & Self-Adaptation
- Mixed trust systems as well as active defense.
Some risks can be avoided, others can be contained and still others simply have to be accepted, Lubich said.
