Vocus and Fortinet launch Secure Shield to tackle Australia’s Shadow AI problem

Almost every Australian organisation now has employees pasting sensitive data, customer records and source code into ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude with no oversight, according to recent Australian government and industry research.

Today Vocus and Fortinet have launched Vocus Secure Shield, a fully managed Unified Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform built to close that visibility gap before the next breach.

In Australia, the federal government’s Jobs and Skills Australia report estimates 21 to 27% of white-collar workers use generative AI without their employer’s knowledge. EY’s 2025 Australian AI Workforce Blueprint found 26% are not permitted to use AI by their employer, while 42% have no clear guidance.

Threat actors are using the same AI tools on the offensive, hyper-personalising social engineering at scale, automating vulnerability discovery, and shrinking the time from finding a flaw to compromising an organisation.

More than 500 notifiable data breaches were reported to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner in the first half of 2025 alone, with malicious or criminal attacks the dominant cause, indicating that companies running a patchwork of legacy security tools are not keeping pace with threats.

"Australian businesses have a Shadow AI problem, and most don't yet realise the scale of it," said Tom Sykes, General Manager Products & Marketing, Vocus. "Employees are using AI. The question isn't whether to allow it, but whether you have visibility into what they're feeding these tools and can put sensible guardrails in place."

"We are seeing strong demand from enterprise and government customers for a service like Secure Shield," Sykes added. "CIOs and CISOs want visibility into what people are doing with AI, not another blocking policy that’s simply worked around. Secure Shield brings together Fortinet’s AI driven cybersecurity platform with the Vocus national network – fibre, mobile and satellite – as a fully managed service."

Building on a long-standing Vocus-Fortinet partnership

Vocus and Fortinet engineers have worked together to build Secure Shield into the Vocus network, in direct response to what Australian CIOs and CISOs have been asking Vocus for.

The product is backed by a Vocus-Fortinet partnership that stretches back 19 years, with approximately 10,000 Fortinet devices and customer end points already under Vocus management across Australian customer environments. This is one of the largest managed Fortinet footprints in the country.

It is the first major managed security product to emerge from the expanded Vocus business following the company’s integration of TPG Telecom’s fibre assets and fixed line enterprise operations, combining security engineering and deployment automation capabilities from across the combined group.

Blocking AI tools doesn't work – visibility does

Blocking generative AI tools at the firewall is whack-a-mole. If ChatGPT is blocked, employees move to Gemini, then Claude, then their personal phone. In one widely publicised incident, engineers pasted proprietary source code into ChatGPT risking it being retained by the AI model, becoming the cautionary tale every CISO knows but few can prove won’t happen on their watch.

"You cannot block your way out of this problem," says Dale Nachman, Senior Regional Director, ANZ, Fortinet. "The only durable answer is deep visibility into what applications your staff are actually using and what data is moving through them, combined with policy-based guardrails that coach users toward good decisions rather than just slamming a door in their face."

Vocus Secure Shield uses Fortinet’s deep application awareness to see not just which AI tool an employee opened, but what they did inside it. Inline data loss prevention flags or blocks sensitive information before it reaches a public language model.

Built into the network, not bolted on

Most cloud-only SASE services route customer traffic through a third-party cloud, adding latency and external dependencies. Vocus Secure Shield takes a different approach. Customer traffic bypasses the internet and connects over Vocus’ private network into Fortinet’s Australian SASE infrastructure through  direct peering. As a result, there’s no tradeoff between security and high performance.

Vocus is also working to extend its existing Metro Ethernet Forum (MEF) 3.0 certification to cover SASE, and when granted it is expected to be an Australian first.

It has automated deployment of the service: Fortinet SD-WAN or SD-Branch devices ship pre-configured and self-provision over 5G once plugged in, allowing new customer locations to be up and running in minutes rather than the hours or days of traditional SD-WAN rollouts.

Vocus Secure Shield is available today to enterprise, government and wholesale customers across Australia. Customers and organisations on legacy SD-WAN platforms can speak to their Vocus account manager, visit vocus.com.au/sase, or call 1300 88 99 88.