How Plains All American Pipeline Simplified Security with Fortinet
How did Plains All American Pipeline simplify its security operations?
Plains All American Pipeline needed security that could keep up with its distributed operations across the U.S. and Canada, covering both IT and OT environments. Working with Fortinet, the company was able to simplify and standardize its security stack while improving visibility and control.
Key steps included:
- Modernizing firewalls across the environment in about six weeks, which helped create a more consistent security posture.
- Deploying SD-WAN to connect remote sites more efficiently and securely.
- Adopting SASE to extend secure access to distributed users and locations.
- Using centralized management to oversee both networking and security from a single platform.
This approach helped Plains reimagine how security and networking work together, reducing complexity while preparing the environment for future automation and AI-driven capabilities.
What business impact did Fortinet have for Plains?
Plains All American Pipeline saw several tangible business benefits from its Fortinet deployment:
- Cost reduction: The team reports cutting costs by approximately 50–70%, a significant improvement in the economics of running security and networking across a large, distributed footprint.
- Faster modernization: Plains modernized its firewalls in about six weeks, which helped accelerate its broader security transformation without long, drawn-out projects.
- Operational simplicity: By consolidating security and networking with Fortinet, Plains reduced the number of tools and vendors it had to manage, which in turn simplified operations for the enterprise technology team.
Overall, Fortinet helped Plains rethink how it manages security for critical infrastructure, balancing cost, speed, and operational efficiency.
How is Plains preparing for AI and future security needs?
Plains All American Pipeline is using Fortinet not just to solve today’s security challenges, but also to prepare for what’s next.
With Fortinet, Plains is:
- Building a unified foundation across firewalls, SD-WAN, and SASE so that future capabilities, including AI-driven automation, can be adopted more easily.
- Centralizing management of security and networking, which is an important prerequisite for applying AI and automation consistently across IT and OT environments.
- Positioning for AI-driven operations by standardizing on a platform that is designed to support more automated, intelligent responses to threats over time.
This strategy helps Plains reshape how it will manage security for critical infrastructure going forward, with a focus on scalability, consistency, and readiness for AI-enabled capabilities.
How Plains All American Pipeline Simplified Security with Fortinet
published by Jertex Networks, LLC.
Jertex (named after Jersey / Texas) is a leading technology integrator focused on solving the business problems of our Small Business clients through better use of technology. We are the IT staff for most of our clients. As such, we help our clients create a stable network foundation to support their overworked office staff, and managers.
Our expertise is in designing, installing and maintaining:
- Voice,
- Data,
- Wireless,
- Video
- Voice over IP (VoIP).
Today our customers are seeing more and more of their line of business applications being moved from an on-site server - to a Cloud or Internet based server. As their technology ages, we help them replace their legacy computers and servers with the right new equipment to lower their up front cost, and computers and servers that just work better for the long term.
We help our customers move their critical email and telephone service to less costly, and easier to maintain hosted (CLOUD) services.
We just launched our new division - JERTEX RECYCLING to help our customers legally dispose of their ancient computers and servers that are clogging up desks, and closets .
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