Fortinet CTO and Co-Founder Michael Xie to Speak at Thought Leadership Forum on Cyber Security

SUNNYVALE, CA--(Marketwired - October 26, 2015) - Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT^[1]) -- the global leader in high-performance cybersecurity solutions, announced that Michael Xie, founder, president and CTO, will participate in today's first annual Cybersecurity Thought Leadership Forum sponsored by Israel's leading cybersecurity foundry Team8, along with Eric Schmidt's Innovation Endeavors and Nasdaq. This invitation-only event will bring together cyber security experts and executive leaders from financial services, technology and consumer companies. Xie will speak on a panel titled "Innovating for the Enterprise."

The Thought Leadership Forum on Cyber Security is part of a series of events Nasdaq has sponsored in October, Cyber Security Awareness Month. The Forum will focus on cyber security challenges and opportunities facing organizations of all sizes, as well as the importance of elevating cyber security to the Boardroom. Additional speakers at this exclusive event include:

• Eric Schmidt, executive chairman of Alphabet, Inc. and founding partner at Innovation Endeavors
• Brad Peterson, executive vice president and CIO at Nasdaq
• Nadav Zafrir, CEO of Team8 and former Commander of the IDF's Intelligence & Technology Unit 8200
• James Kaplan, principal of cyber security at McKinsey & Company
• And many others

Xie will focus on the importance of CSOs taking a holistic approach to security.

"One of the biggest trends we see is a greater focus on internal segmentation," said Xie. "There's always been a focus on protecting the perimeter, but the explosion of the Internet of Things has created new network attack vectors that organizations are simply not prepared to defend against."

Fortinet believes in protecting the network from the inside out. Trends like cloud computing and BYOD offer new -- and frequently less secure -- ways to access a network.

"Companies must understand they can implement layers of security without compromising on the performance of their network or their business," continued Xie.

About Fortinet

Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT^[2]) protects the most valuable assets of some of the largest enterprise, service provider and government organizations across the globe. The company's fast, secure and global cyber security solutions provide broad, high-performance protection against dynamic security threats while simplifying the IT infrastructure. They are strengthened by the industry's highest level of threat research, intelligence and analytics. Unlike pure-play network security providers, Fortinet can solve organizations' most important security challenges, whether in networked, application or mobile environments - be it virtualized/cloud or physical. More than 210,000 customers worldwide, including some of the largest and most complex organizations, trust Fortinet to protect their brands. Learn more at http://www.fortinet.com^[3], the Fortinet Blog or FortiGuard Labs.

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