Fortinet – Most Innovative Cybersecurity Solution
Fortinet’s Breakthrough in Securing the Connected Factory.
In an exclusive interview, Manufacturing Today spoke with Richard Springer, Senior Director, Operational Technology Product Marketing at Fortinet, about their win for Most Innovative Cybersecurity Solution.
Fortinet, the global cybersecurity leader, has been honored with the Most Innovative Cybersecurity Solution award in the Manufacturing Supplier Innovation US Awards, recognizing its breakthrough work in securing the increasingly interconnected operational technology (OT) environments of the manufacturing sector. This award validates Fortinet’s two decades of dedication to a space that has recently become the world’s most targeted industrial vertical.
Redefining Cybersecurity: From the Carpet to the Conveyor Belt
For modern manufacturers, the convergence of IT and OT networks—moving from the “carpet to the conveyor belt”—has created unprecedented risk. Fortinet’s core mission within the manufacturing sector is to guard against threat actors by providing specialized cybersecurity solutions for both IT and OT networks, ensuring comprehensive coverage all the way down to the devices that run pumps, conveyor belts, and even autonomous warehouse vehicles.
This drive is centered on innovation—a value that extends from the high-level security fabric down to the custom-designed FortiGate firewalls, which utilize proprietary chip technology to maximize performance and energy efficiency. Beyond technology, Fortinet is driven by the mission of safeguarding the world’s critical infrastructure, including the processes that deliver our food and water, reflecting the company’s commitment to protecting the essential systems society depends on.
The Winning Innovation: Protecting Production Loss
The winning recognition is for the Fortinet OT Security Platform, a suite of 20-plus solution specifically engineered for industrial environments.
The solution directly addresses the critical security gap created by IT/OT convergence and the risk posed by aging, unpatched industrial control systems (ICS). According to the company’s research, manufacturing has risen to become the most targeted vertical over the last two to three years, as detailed in the Global Threat Landscape Report. This shift was triggered by the understanding among ransom groups that they could monetize production loss or stoppage, adding a new variable to their ransom calculus.
The OT Security Platform is structured around three pillars:
- Secure Networking: Provides the backbone for modernization using ruggedized, fanless, and temperature-resistant FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls and FortiSwitches, which are essential for segmenting flat industrial networks.
- Zero Trust & Secure Access Service Edge (SASE): Leverages tools like FortiPAM (Privileged Access Management) and multi-factor authentication (MFA) to ensure that remote employees, service providers, and contractors connect safely under a Zero Trust model.
- Security Operations (SecOps): Augments traditional security tools (like SIEM, SOAR, EDR) to digest and understand OT traffic. These tools are embedded with the Purdue Model (a vertical reference architecture) and the MITRE ATT&CK for ICS matrix, providing OT-specific threat mapping and asset identification that allow users to seamlessly click between IT and OT views.
Ultimately, the platform enables manufacturers to build operational resilience and transition away from the costly cycle of paying ransoms, empowering them to rebuild and restore their network faster and cheaper than succumbing to extortion.
Built for the Harsh Reality of Industrial Cabinets
Fortinet has the world’s largest install base of secure networking products, giving them unparalleled insight into customer environments and creating a continuous feedback loop that shapes product development. This is especially important in OT, where customers consistently need rugged, size-constrained devices that can operate reliably in harsh conditions.
“The challenge is there’s continual process of adding feature sets into these security devices, and in OT, the added challenge is that you are limited on space,” explains Richard Springer. “Legacy factories built decades ago aren’t bringing in brand new cabinets, so new devices with vastly more processing power must fit into the old, smaller footprints.”
Fortinet addresses this by using intense, highly specialized engineering—a commitment exemplified by the company winning the 2025 Red Dot Product Design Award for the FortiGate Rugged Series. This agility—the ability to pivot and address critical customer engineering requests quickly—is Fortinet’s greatest strength, allowing it to produce high-quality, highly functional security products designed for harsh, remote environments.
Tangible Results: Consolidating Security at Toyota Material Handling
The market’s response to the OT Security Platform has been dramatic, especially as OT risk has elevated into the C-suite’s area of responsibility over the last four years, a shift documented in the 2025 State of Operational Technology and Cybersecurity report.
A prime example of this success is Toyota Material Handling North America (TMH). Faced with an aging security infrastructure and a high risk of lateral movement across their network, TMH needed to modernize their systems and converge their IT and OT environments. They deployed FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls, FortiSwitch, and the FortiDeceptor deception solution, a process that TMH’s Senior Network Architect Christopher Garcia described as creating a “single place to go and manage everything”. This deployment resulted in:
- Significant time savings from consolidated networking and security management.
- Increased visibility of devices across on-premises and remote worker environments.
- A more proactive security posture and increased visibility within their OT environment.
Looking Ahead: Gen AI and Security at the Device Level
The future of OT security will be characterized by aggressive moves in two areas:
- Advanced AI: Fortinet is embedding Generative AI (Gen AI) into its SecOps solutions to create a sophisticated OT SOC (Security Operations Center). This includes the development of agentic AI, which will continue to move at light speed to help address the severe personnel deficit compounded in the OT space. The goal is not to eliminate jobs, but to “elevate humans to do more sophisticated, more precise, more real-time work”.
- Microsegmentation and Deception: For legacy devices that are old and unpatchable, Fortinet is focusing on microsegmentation (compartmentalizing the device) and virtual patching (blocking malicious traffic via policy). Furthermore, Fortinet is working with industrial control vendors to bring a containerized FortiOS and other endpoint concepts to move security directly onto the highly specialized devices themselves.
Validation of a Trusted OT Partner
Winning the Most Innovative Cybersecurity Solution award serves as validation of Fortinet’s two decades of strategic investment in OT, a space that operated “silently” until recently.
“To have this award is really that validation of the width and breadth of what has been engineered and available to our customers,” Springer states. “We are the trusted OT partner, and this award helps validate that.”
It reinforces Fortinet’s commitment to ensuring its manufacturing clients can immediately embrace the future of Industry 4.0, while also protecting the critical infrastructure that keeps the global economy running.