Fortinet Leads the Market with Secure SD-WAN Innovation

Fortinet announced new innovations and continued market share momentum for its Secure SD-WAN solution. The flexibility and scalability of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN have 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.

A highly scalable and flexible SD-WAN solution

Fortinet delivers Secure SD-WAN as an integrated feature of its industry-leading 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 centralized 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.

Fortinet’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 datacenters, 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 the distributed cloud has helped the solution further standout.

Home Office: Offered as a desktop appliance with built-in LTE, FortiGate 40F supports “super users” at home who require their applications to work without fail for business-critical activities such as customer video demonstrations.

With the minimal footprint of Fortinet’s desktop appliance, remote workers can procure and install a solution at their home offices to handle routing, security, and wireless needs in a single, integrated platform.

The critical advantage of extending SD-WAN functionality to individual teleworkers, especially super users, is that they can enjoy on-demand remote access as well as dynamically scalable performance regardless of their local network availability.

And when others in the organization rely on these individuals to do their jobs quickly and efficiently, SD-WAN functionality can make all the difference.

Branch: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is perhaps the most well-known for supporting complex branch deployments with advanced routing and cloud on-ramp capabilities, which has helped thousands of customers to reduce their use of point products such as legacy routers while improving business application experience.

Distributed Cloud: For organizations with applications in distributed clouds, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers the most comprehensive technology building blocks for interconnecting clouds for better user experience.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is available in every cloud provider and enables the industry’s highest IPsec throughput at 20Gbps to interconnect clouds.

With native application steering and cloud integration framework, as well as a fully programmable API, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN helps customers to connect hundreds of cloud environments.

Fastest growing SD-WAN vendor

Fortinet 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,” Fortinet has the third-highest revenue market share at 10.4% for the Enterprise WAN Edge Equipment worldwide for 4Q19.

Fortinet 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.

A Commitment to Organic Innovation

Fortinet is the only major player in this market with an internally developed offering that provides security and networking in a single solution.

Fortinet 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 organizations overcome challenges associated with manually managing legacy routers, Fortinet introduced an intuitive Secure SD-WAN orchestrator as part of the Fortinet Fabric Management Center.

This allows customers to significantly simplify centralized deployment and enable automation using intuitive workflows to save time and offer business-centric policies.

Enhanced analytics: To help organizations 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.

“Fortinet always provides high-quality products and support. With integrated security, routing, and SD-WAN all in one appliance, it was a solution that both our network and security teams could rally behind, thus leading to better collaboration and enabling us to architect a solution for our complex multi-tower requirements.”- Marco Fernandes, Security Solution Manager, IBM