Fortinet announced that the United States Patent and Trademark Office has awarded the company four additional patents for network virtualization and security related inventions. These new patents strengthen Fortinet's growing intellectual property portfolio, bringing Fortinet's total awarded patents to 17.

The four new patents reflect Fortinet's focus, as a leading UTM vendor, on innovative methods for efficiently processing network data while applying various security-related filtration processes within a consolidated and accelerated platform. Three of the newly awarded patents are directed to the routing and processing of data in virtualized environments. In addition to these four new patents, Fortinet has more than 80 patent-pending and in-process applications.

"These patents support Fortinet's innovation and vision for an integrated, multi-threat and virtualized approach to network security -- groundswell areas for the networking and security industries," said Michael Xie, CTO and co-founder of Fortinet. "As we continue our strong research and development efforts, our growing patent portfolio provides momentum for accelerating the course of innovation we are undertaking."

Fortinet's new patents are key in propelling some of the highest impact technologies and business trends of the day -- security consolidation and virtualization. As enterprise companies of all sizes look for ways to economize without compromising the safety of their networks, security consolidation and virtualization provide a powerful approach for maximizing both human and capital resources.

Integrated network and application security, together with virtualization technologies, offer a powerful and synergistic approach for defending against an increasingly dangerous cyber-criminal environment. In combination with its extensive patent-pending applications and patents already granted, Fortinet's newest patents address critical technologies that enable comprehensive network protection:

• U.S. Patent #7,333,430 - Systems and Methods for Passing Network Traffic Data - directed to efficiently processing network traffic data to facilitate policy enforcement, including content scanning, source/destination verification, virus scanning, content detection and intrusion detection
• U.S. Patent #7,340,535 - System and Method for Controlling Routing in a Virtual Router System - directed to controlling the routing of network data, and providing efficient configuration of routing functionality and optimized use of available resources by applying functions to data packets in a virtual environment;
• U.S. Patent #7,376,125 - Service Processing Switch - directed to providing IP services and IP packet processing in a virtual router-based system using IP flow caches, virtual routing engines, virtual services engines and advanced security engines;
• U.S. Patent # 7,389,358 - Distributed Virtual System to Support Managed, Network-based Services - directed to a virtual routing system, which includes processing elements to manage and optimize IP traffic, useful for service provider switching functions at Internet point-of-presence (POP) locations.