2024 Cloud and Security Conference — Fortinet’s John Ward on the importance of cloud observability

John Ward, the Principal of SME for Public Cloud Technologies in Africa at Fortinet, recently featured on a panel at the MyBroadband Cloud and Security Conference 2024.

Ward boasts over 20 years of cybersecurity experience and has a proven track record for making a difference to his clients by delivering scalable and cost-effective solutions.

He specialises in engineering, cybersecurity, the cloud, and “anything that connects or is connected to.”

He has worked at Fortinet for nearly ten years. Before this, he was a Fortinet Certified Trainer at Networks Unlimited, and has also worked at MTN and Metropolitan Life.

Ward strongly believes in assisting and partnering with people to provide scalable and cost-effective solutions and processes for problems.

Panel discussion

In this panel discussion, Ward began by giving attendees advice on how to migrate to the cloud while mitigating the potential security risks.

“My best advice is to break everything down into individual components,” said Ward.

“The idea is to plan everything up front.”

He added that scalability must be front-of-mind when putting anything into the cloud — as this is one of the cloud’s major benefits.

“For example, if you are an online media publication, and Dricus du Plessis fights in the UFC in the early hours of the morning, you must be able to scale — even if your system isn’t used to incurring such high loads at this time.”

Observability

Ward then discussed another key focus point when businesses implement solutions in the cloud: visibility.

“With many of our new clients, and the businesses who approach our partners like Maxtec, a main challenge is that they don’t have the visibility they need to secure their cloud environment,” said Ward.

He explained that while monitoring individual containers provides a degree of security, it does not account for how different containers communicate with each other.

This makes it difficult to see when anomalies occur between different containers, which are just as important to protect against as internal anomalies.

If the company has not implemented a world-class observability solution, it will not be able to pick up on these anomalies, and risks getting targeted by malicious actors.

Ward said businesses that use Fortinet through its local partners, like Maxtec, will benefit from adaptive security that provides the necessary visibility and control measures to secure their cloud resources.

Click here to learn more about Fortinet’s cloud security solutions.