“If you want to make beautiful music, you must play the black and the white notes together.” ― Richard M. Nixon

Does your product integrate with other security products?

At this point, you should hate product silos (point products) as much as I do.  I understand and respect “divide and conquer” or “best of breed” strategies. I also understand having different security vendors at different layers of the network could possibly prevent an incident better (one vendor might not see/catch a vulnerability but another might have a signature or way of catching it). But isn’t it time to ask your vendors how and if they can work with each other? So what we (vendors) are competitors?  If by integrating with each other, we are able to increase the return on investment (ROI) for the customer, then why not (I know it might sound naive and unaware, but could you just imagine).

Vendors have application programming interfaces (APIs) for interaction with other platforms.  However, customers have to have application development resources to write code for these APIs, and that's not answer to a true and native integration.

Wouldn’t it be nice for vendors to participate in a unified platform or fabric (such as Fortinet’s cooperative security fabric) where customers could easily integrate their products and have a stronger overall security solution? For example, application protocol clients on endpoints from one vendor, working with the sandbox technology of another vendor which then work seamlessly with another vendor’s SD-WAN controller?

There is a reason I brought this topic up. At Fortinet, we came to that conclusion rather early as the next generation of network security. 

Fortinet Security Fabric 

There are a lot of documentation on the Fortinet site about the fabric, its components, benefits and its partners. I have had the chance to work on integrating our sandbox technology with CarbonBlack Protection software. Talking about a match between two superior products.

Fortinet has partnered with over 30 different manufacturers (the number is growing) to "get more value from their security deployments".

To wrap up, don't just ask your vendors for more discount, ask them how they can play nice with others in your playground.