Fortinet® a global leader in high-performance network security - today announced support for secure access to the Microsoft Azure cloud platform. As organizations continue to migrate mission critical applications to the cloud, secure access to sensitive data and application workloads remains critically important. Starting today, customers can immediately benefit from a secure virtual private network access to Microsoft’s Azure cloud offering while leveraging Fortinet’s broad and multi-layered security technologies across network, application and content security.

"Microsoft Azure's cloud scalability, performance and economic benefits make it a convincing choice for customers wanting to leverage the cloud while continuing to use existing on-premises infrastructure," said Venkat Gattamneni, Senior Product Marketing Manager, Microsoft Azure, Microsoft. "These customers require secure VPN access from office and branch networks to the cloud, and Fortinet’s next-generation firewall platforms extend on-premises datacenters to the cloud while enabling security."

All Fortinet FortiGate security appliances offer full support for VPN access to the Microsoft Azure Virtual Network service, allowing organizations to quickly and easily create secure VPN tunnels linking on-premise networks and cloud environments. In addition, all FortiGate appliances uniquely deliver centralized management of virtualized and physical infrastructures through a “single-pane-of-glass” approach to management. By adding support for Microsoft Azure on top of its existing support for Windows Server with Hyper-V, Fortinet now delivers the industry’s broadest range of security solutions for virtualized infrastructures.

"As we work with customers to extend on-premises infrastructure to the cloud using Microsoft Azure, we need to ensure both a high level of security and seamless data access across multiple environments," said Michael Xie, founder, CTO and president of Fortinet. "Fortinet is unique in its ability to deliver powerful threat prevention for network, email, Web and content across any combination of cloud, network and virtualized environment." Microsoft Azure is rapidly gaining momentum with 57 percent of Fortune 500 enterprises as customers.¹ Azure now accounts for more than 20 percent of the enterprise cloud computing market, a number that is projected to grow to 35 percent in 2014 according to Forrester Research, Inc., Analyst James Staten in an April 2013 Bloomberg News article titled "Microsoft Azure Sales Top $1 Billion Challenging Amazon."²

"Microsoft Azure is clearly a compelling solution for organizations that are looking to improve and extend availability of their IT services," said John Maddison, vice president of marketing for Fortinet. "We are pleased to work closely with Microsoft to bring the same level of broad and best-in-class security that companies rely on for private networks to these growing cloud connections."