May 14, 2009; BANGALORE: Here's an interesting take on why cyber security is becoming a bigger challenge than ever before: With pink slips being passed around like nobody's business in the real Silicon Valley as well in the hopeful claimants from Bangalore to Barcelona, there are suddenly, a lot of sharp brains out there, with no numbers to crunch, no problems to attack. So what do some of these best and bravest has-beens do? They keep those "little grey cells" as Agatha Christie's fictional sleuth Hercule Poirot call them, in good working order by bending their minds to cyber crime. "Voila!", as Poitot would have said, the sneak attacks on corporate networks increase, the danger level shoots up.

Which for a player like Fortinet (http://www.fortinet.com/) is not just a challenge but an opportunity. Hence this week's world-wide anouncements of new, improved versions of its multi-threat security platform, Forti-Gate, coupled with significant enhancements to its FortiOS Carfrier 4.0 operating system.

At the India announcement in Bangalore, Wednesday, Patrice Perche, Fortinet's Vice President for Sales for Europe, Middle East, Africa and South Asia, listed four notable new features in its offerings including optimizing Wide area network traffic to reduce vulnerable to and fro traffic between server and application; recognizing traffic based on the application which generated it; increased security for encrypted traffic streams and prevention of data leakage. The new offerings supported virtualization systems that harnessed cloud computing, he added.

According to Fortinet's Regional Director for India and the South Asia region, the emerging trend in this business was converged solutions -- and clearly it was working for Fortinet. In its headquarters in Sunnyvale the company had bucked the trend, hiring, when its neighbours were firing. The company is number three worldwide and in India in the overall network security market, but number one when it came to unified solutions. Indian clients include Jet Airways, HIndusthan Times, United Breweries, L&T -- and almost all the top telecom providers.