This is a summary of an article written for Channel Futures. The entire article can be accessed here.

It is no secret that cyber criminals don't play by the rules. This is especially true even as organizations scramble to rapidly transition to a secure remote worker strategy. Unlike many IT teams and systems administrators, these cyber criminals are able to look at your customer's network as a single, interconnected entity, and will take every opportunity to exploit any opportunity for their own personal gain.  

This inability to see the network as a single, integrated system, known as the "silo effect," is dangerous and all too common across industries. And this issue is being compounded now as the majority of workers now access network resources from remote locations.

One outcome of this fractured approach to the network is that far too often, to meet their evolving cybersecurity needs, companies will deploy one-off security solutions in different areas of their networks. While this may address some local security concerns, doing so can isolate threat intelligence, making it difficult to correlate threat intelligence and detect sophisticated attacks. For those organizations that employ a digital business model, this is a serious problem. While data is considered the currency of today's economy, establishing consistent data visibility in such an environment can be next to impossible.

Malicious actors know this and use it to their advantage. Organizations that restrict resources to teams within specific silos limit their network visibility, thereby making them more vulnerable to today's complex attack strategies. Multi-vector attacks are difficult to manage in an integrated network, let alone when a team has a limited view of network functions. Furthermore, detecting malware can be challenging when the team responsible for security has no control over the data or resources being consumed or delivered.

The Partner Opportunity

Partners are in a prime position to help customers strengthen their data security protocols to address this challenge. As a Fortinet partner, you can offer your expertise to help customers identify security gaps while also providing them with best-of-breed security solutions that can also function as a single integrated security fabric.

Here are five steps partners can follow to implement effective security services that bridge the gap between traditionally isolated security devices.

1. Technology Integration
   Today's threat landscape is ever-evolving, meaning customers need integrated security solutions that enable them to detect and manage a variety of threats. Building a fabric-based security framework enables security technologies to span distributed networks as a single, integrated security solution. By linking different security technologies under a common framework, you can help customers coordinate their threat response efforts, thereby reducing the "silo effect."
   
   
2. Unified Intelligence
   When deploying a unified security strategy, partners can ensure that all deployed security solutions operate under the same set of policies, protocols, and intelligence. Adding a common threat intelligence service to a fabric-based security strategy ensures that all security tools deployed across an infrastructure are aligned when it comes to identifying and responding to new threats.
   
   
3. Consistent Application of Services
   By offering a uniform set of security services, partners can tie different security solutions together even further. Services such as sandboxing and application controls enable partners to use a common set of intelligence techniques to better identify and respond to threats. 
   
   
4. Process Automation
   As the time between a breach and the compromise of data is reduced, human decision-making delays can no longer be tolerated. To address this growing challenge, partners can also offer decision-making and analysis engines that take humans out of the loop. Leveraging Fortinet's integrated AI engines and automation to perform analysis at scale can close the gap on threat impact and allow IT teams to focus their energy on high-level threats.
   
   
5. Network Access Controls 
   As more companies transition to a work from home strategy, providing network access control services has become imperative. Partners should work with customers to ensure they have visibility into the devices that are connected to their network. Having network access controls allows for this and enables coordinated threat responses across the network. 

Final Thoughts

Knowledge of the attack landscape and the ability to quickly respond to threats have become fundamental aspects of customer security. By providing security services, partners can ensure that their customers are protected, regardless of how complex their network environments may be.

Current partners can visit the Partner Portal to find important updates from Fortinet and our partner program.

Find out how Fortinet's Security Fabric delivers broad, integrated, and automated protection across an organization's entire digital attack surface from IoT to the edge, network core and to multi-clouds.