Chief Information Security Officer, Fortinet
Search every verified Carl Windsor interview, podcast appearance, and on-the-record quote — each transcript cross-checked by AI and human review to confirm speaker identity. In a December 2023 Cube Conversation, Carl Windsor, Senior Vice President of Product Technology & Solutions at Fortinet, discussed the company’s approach to transparency in cybersecurity. He stated that Fortinet shipped 50% of all worldwide firewalls the previous year and described a "duty of care" to customers. Windsor said the company discovered 83% of the vulnerabilities it published were its own, adding that Fortinet does not hide issues and provides customers with information needed for risk-based decisions. He described the principle that "sunlight is the greatest disinfectant" and said the company works with outside partners on responsible disclosure. Windsor acknowledged that customers find the pace of change "a little bit frenetic" and suggested that vendors can help by offering automatic upgrades and virtual patching technologies to give customers "breathing space" during upgrade processes. He emphasized that "radical transparency" is important for giving customers the information they need to make decisions about their security posture.
“Fortinet, last year, shipped 50% of all the worldwide firewalls, so we have a duty of care to our customers.”
“Sunlight is the greatest disinfectant — we will look at our products, we will look for vulnerabilities, we will work with our outside partners who're doing responsible disclosure.”
“The key thing is to secure the products, to look for the issues that may lie, to fix them rapidly, but then to get as much information out to the customer as possible so they know, give them the information that they need to assess the risk.”
“Last year we discovered 83% of all of the vulnerabilities that we published were actually our own, and we're not hiding things — we make sure that if there's any risk we give our customers the information that they need to make that risk-based decision.”
In this Cube Conversation theCUBE host and analyst discusses The State of Transparency in Cyber Security, with Suzanne Spaulding, Former Under Secretary for Cyber and Infrastructure at Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and Dr. Carl Windsor, Senior Vice President, Product Technology & Solutions at Fortinet
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