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 BlueTeamAssess LLC
I founded BlueTeamAssess LLC to develop and offer actionable and cost effective security solutions to SMBs.
BlueTeamAssess LLC is a veteran-owned Cybersecurity Consulting business based in Onslow County, NC.
My company wants to be the trusted advisor to small businesses for cybersecurity and related information technology needs. We will help you meet compliance requirements for HIPAA, PCI, NC cybersecurity requirements for financial advisors, and NIST 800-171 and CMMC cybersecurity requirements for providing goods and services through DOD contracts.
We help small businesses understand cybersecurity threats and their vulnerability to those threats. We offer affordable products and services to protect their business and their livelihood from those threats.
We use the SAINT Security Suite and its family of assessment products to provide cybersecurity services that assess your exposure to the many threats that can impact your business. And we help you meet compliance requirements for NIST 800-171 cybersecurity requirements for providing goods and services through DOD contracts as well as for HIPAA, PCI, the NC data breach protection law and NC cybersecurity requirements for financial advisors.
We use the CyberSecurity Assessment Tool from QS Solutions to assess the security posture of your Microsoft 365 deployment and help bring your risk score to acceptable levels through our remediation services.
We will help you reduce SPAM, secure your email and defend against ransomware. To help do this, we offer a number of solutions scalable for small business budgets and environments. These include:
- Microsoft 365 email and office software and its extensive security features and advanced threat protection.
- Fortinet security solutions that provide a Security Fabric that knits together protection for your endpoints and servers, your firewalls, your wireless network, security analytics and many other services that protect your organization technology from today’s advanced threats whether the workers are working in the office or remotely from home.
- A backup and recovery solution from Acronis to protect your critical customer and business data when the next storm or other disaster impacts your business.
You can trust BlueTeamAssess LLC be the trusted advisor to small businesses for cybersecurity and related information technology needs.