Fortinet Announces Secure SD-WAN Innovations

Fortinet has announced new innovations and continued market share momentum for its Secure SD-WAN solution. The flexibility and scalability of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has helped customers of all sizes deploy at home offices, in branch offices and between distributed clouds while providing the best possible user experience and security.

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO, Fortinet, said, “SD-WAN is not just for the branch, it’s an important technology for the entire end-to-end enterprise. With applications for work from home, campus to cloud, data centre to cloud, and the ability to connect clouds together, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is a hugely impactful technology that improves user experience and drives cost efficiency and time savings for organisations. Fortinet is one of the fastest growing SD-WAN providers and the only major player in this market with an internally developed offering that provides security and networking in a single solution.”

Fortinet delivers Secure SD-WAN as an integrated feature of its  FortiGate next-generation firewall, powered by the industry’s first SD-WAN ASIC to enable better application experience, higher performance, and better cost efficiency. To help implement network changes that ensure business continuity for an expanding remote workforce with minimum IT staff and infrastructure resources, FortiGate’s broad product portfolio with built-in SD-WAN offers flexible business policies from a centralised Fabric Management Center console. These intuitive policies allow faster configuration rollouts at scale within minutes to enable the best performance for collaboration applications such as voice/video conferencing and SaaS applications.

The vendor’s Secure SD-WAN product portfolio is not limited to just enterprise use cases and comes in a wide range of appliances, ranging from solutions that cater to large data centres, down to appliances designed for branch offices, remote sites, and even small home offices. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN’s ability to scale from home office to branch to distributed cloud has helped the solution further standout.

 The company is one of the fastest growing SD-WAN vendors and is positioned among the highest three vendors in worldwide market share for SD-WAN equipment by revenue.

As noted in Gartner’s March 2020 SD-WAN market share report titled, “Market Share: Enterprise Network Equipment by Market Segment, Worldwide, 4Q19,” the company has the third highest revenue market share at 10.4% for the Enterprise WAN Edge Equipment worldwide for 4Q19.

The firm also appears amongst the top three SD-WAN vendors in a recent Omdia report (“Omdia Market Share : Data Center Network Equipment Q4 2019 ”). This report shows Fortinet as the fastest growing vendor among all other SD-WAN vendors. The same report notes 305% year-over-year growth in Fortinet’s SD-WAN revenue.

Fortinet has announced new capabilities for Secure SD-WAN as part of FortiOS 6.4, including enhanced analytics, a new SD-WAN orchestrator and more segmentation options.

• Secure SD-WAN orchestrator: To help organisations overcome challenges associated with manually managing legacy routers, the company has introduced an intuitive Secure SD-WAN orchestrator as part of the Fortinet Fabric Management Center. This allows customers to significantly simplify centralised deployment and enable automation using intuitive workflows to save time and offer business centric policies.
• Enhanced analytics: To help organisations gain visibility into network and application performance (both real-time and historical statistics), Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers enhanced analytics, as well as enhanced compliance, and delivers new SD-WAN reports via the Fabric Management Center. A single console and rich SD-WAN analytics help customers fine-tune their business and security policies to improve quality of experience for all users.
• Dynamic segmentation: Many enterprises encounter challenges with implementing flexible deployment options for their diverse branch office infrastructure at-scale and face difficulties when creating segments to configure unique policies and rules for each network/user. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN innovation within FortiOS 6.4 ensures these segments are communicated/carried forward to the entire network seamlessly and ensures the unique policies are enforced end-to-end.