Company ProfileFortiusOne
FortiusOne, Inc.
1200 Eton Court NW, Suite 300
Washington, DC 20007
Phone: 202.333.8559
For many graduate students, the hard work of writing a thesis is accompanied by the knowledge that few will read the results of their labor. For Sean Gorman, former George Mason University graduate student and now president and CTO of critical infrastructure analysis group FortiusOne, that concern took a different twist. As he was completing his project, which mapped fiber optics, power, and other communications and infrastructure networks throughout the United States and located strategic vulnerabilities, it became clear that intelligence officials would much rather have the paper burned than published. Highlighting spots where extremely low-level attacks could wreak havoc with the nation’s critical infrastructure, the thesis was eventually published as a book that is available for sale today on Amazon.com.
Sean Gorman, meanwhile, has turned several pieces of that research — as well as additional company-grown intellectual property — into a business that assists public and private sector entities to identify bottlenecks and weaknesses in their own networks and points at which the overlaps with public networks such as those for transportation and communication, and even environmental “networks’ such as weather patterns, pose risk. FortiusOne’s software solution, the Spatial Analysis Engine, maps these risks and runs scenarios to identify how the network in question might act under various forms of stress. Completing analyses in seconds that have previously taken many hours to run, the software can be set up to display complex results in simple visual terms, and addresses physical infrastructure resiliency, security, and the allocation of scarce resources for application to business continuity and operations planning, disaster response and recovery, and homeland security and defense.
One point that really makes the company different, Gorman reveals, is the capability to base its analysis on an intensive ROI view of security spending, drawing on an understanding of the business case for such investment that is sometimes lacking in the doomsday industry. Today, the company’s analysis tools are available through fixed-price or specialized consulting packages, but they are also working on a software package that clients will run on-site, making it a tool not just for white-paper risk assessment, but also on-the-fly network monitoring and adjustment.
Early FortiusOne clients include DHS and financial sector groups, but the company estimates the market at $40 billion, and sees growth potential in other areas and levels of government, as well as in the transportation, energy, telecommunications, insurance and supply chain industries. Gorman is also involved with DHS as a subject matter expert for the Critical Infrastructure Task Force of the Homeland Security Advisory Council, a group that has focused on ways to involve the business community more directly in infrastructure security investment.
Founded in 2005 and based in Washington, D.C., FortiusOne draws on the leadership expertise of Daniel Abraham, formerly president and CEO of Cryptek, and previously affiliated with Arrowhead Global Solutions and Titan Systems Corporation. Several other members of the nine-person company have recent or ongoing ties to George Mason University.
