Continually Evolving its Firewall-Native SD-WAN Features Based on Customer Feedback, Fortinet Provides Secure SD-WAN for Three Distinct Use Cases
Fortinet has gained significant traction in the SD-WAN marketplace by delivering a comprehensive SD-WAN solution that provides both SD-WAN and security functionality in a single integrated offering for distributed enterprise branches.
The growing appeal of SD-WAN technologies has caught the attention of the IT world and many are realizing the benefits of efficient cloud adoption, broad application visibility and lowered operating costs. But without the right solution, the speed and agility of SD-WAN can come at the expense of security. To respond to this pervasive industry challenge, Fortinet produced the industry’s first NGFW-centric approach to SD-WAN by tightly integrating SD-WAN functionality into the FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall. This approach produces a compelling solution that combines the increased scalability, flexibility, simplicity and cost savings of SD-WAN with industry-leading security protection.
As bandwidth requirements increase and OPEX budget requirements grow for IT, many customers are migrating away from MPLS and turning toward SD-WAN to reduce OPEX spending. As customers adopt low cost WAN connectivity, they often run into issues with application performance. To address this issue, automated multi-path intelligence, a key feature of FortiOS for SD-WAN, significantly reduces this time by selecting the most efficient route for SaaS, Voice over IP (VoIP) and other business-critical traffic through the tracking of granular WAN path information, such as latency, jitter and packet loss.
Without an integrated solution, IT staff is required to manage both SD-WAN optimization functions and security functions using two different interfaces. This separation of network and security operations is not only labor-intensive, it also makes it difficult to tie things like traditionally network-centric issues such as performance and functionality to critical security and data inspection. To solve this issue, Fortinet has simplified monitoring of SD-WAN deployments with a single-pane-of-glass view for centralized management, configuration and monitoring tools for both SD-WAN and security. As the leader in theenterprise firewall, as well as UTM market, Fortinet has a long history of understanding the needs of our customers from both a security and networking perspective. Fortinet is uniquely positioned to provide a comprehensive secure SD-WAN solution that consolidates several point products at the branch, including routing, WAN optimization, SD-WAN and security elements, into a single device.
Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC, Fortinet said, “The enterprise branch is undergoing intense digital transformation and we’re seeing application consumption models rapidly move to the cloud. As our customers move toward direct internet access, they understand the growing need for next-generation firewall capabilities and high SSL inspection performance. To make sure customers realize the benefits of SD-WAN without compromising security, Fortinet has evolved our advanced SD-WAN features in the latest FortiOS releases. This focus on secure SD-WAN is clearly resonating with the hundreds of customers and partners who are taking advantage of Fortinet’s unique combination of next-generation firewall and SD-WAN in the same offering, managed through a single centralized controller.”
