Fortinet’s Security-First Approach to SD-WAN Continues to Gain Momentum

“In today’s threat landscape, security can never be an afterthought in any network deployment. Fortinet’s focused innovations and evolution of best-of-breed SD-WAN with in-built next-generation firewall provides the advanced threat protection necessary for direct internet connectivity. Our philosophy of tightly integrating security and SD-WAN functionality together minimizes management complexity, ensures a safer deployment and helps reduce costs. It’s clearly resonating with customers and we’re seeing rapid adoption of FortiGate Secure SD-WAN," comments Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC at Fortinet

Organizations Are Struggling to Secure their SD-WAN Deployments

Fortinet Delivers Truly Secure SD-WAN

Fortinet’s FortiGate Secure SD-WAN solution delivers the functionality provided by pure-play SD-WAN vendors with advanced security builtinto one single offering. It’s backed by independent testing to deliver excellent quality of experience for voice and video, high VPN throughput and best price/performance. At Fortinet, SD-WAN functionality has been organically developed in-house and is a feature of every FortiGate Next-Generation Firewall. Purpose-built security processors and threat intelligence from FortiGuard Labs further ensure that security is an integral part of Fortinet’s SD-WAN solution.

Recent Fortinet Secure SD-WAN Highlights from Third-Parties:

• Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure: Fortinet is positioned furthest for completeness of vision in the Challengers quadrant of the first Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.
• Most Reviews in Gartner Peer Insights: Fortinet has the most reviews of all vendors in Gartner Peer Insights for the WAN Edge Infrastructure Market as of 14 Dec. 2018. More information here.
• NSS Labs SD-WAN Recommended Rating: Fortinet was the only vendor with security capabilities to receive an SD-WAN "Recommended" rating in the first NSS Labs Software-Defined Wide Area Networking test report.

Security Best Practices Leveraging FortiGate Secure SD-WAN:

Organizations around the world are choosing Fortinet’s FortiGate Secure SD-WAN; here are four best practices customers have used to adopt a security-first SD-WAN deployment leveraging Fortinet’s solution:

• #1: Enterprise-Grade Security for Direct Internet Access

With increasing bandwidth requirements, many enterprise branches are moving away from MPLS in favor of broadband in order to reduce OPEX spending. This increases the security risk as critical applications are using direct internet access. FortiGate Secure SD-WAN allows customers to use enterprise-class next-generation firewall security to provide complete threat protection and detection along with providing high quality ofexperience for business intent applications.

• #2: Deep Inspection of Encrypted Traffic to Support Digital Transformation

Enterprises are adopting more SaaS applications to improve operational efficiency. However, with the change in application landscape,encrypted traffic has hit a new all-time threshold of over 72 percent of all network traffic. Hackers are taking advantage of this trend and hiding malware in encrypted traffic. FortiGate Secure SD-WAN is one of the only offeringswith a purpose-built processor designed to provide deep SSL inspection with high performance at the WAN Edge to inspect malware traffic while also providing deep visibility into applications.

• #3: Security for SD-Branch

SD-WAN provides the application automation and agility required to simplify network operations, but lacks integration with other branch devices. Fortinet enables customers to extend SD-WAN to SD-Branch by using Fortinet’s secure access point and switches. Fortinet innovations continue to provide deep integration between FortiGate, FortiAP and FortiSwitch to allow customers to significantly reduce complexity by deploying unified security, visibility and management across the branch.

• #4: Achieve Compliance with Security Rating Services

FortiGate Secure SD-WAN provides the industry’s first ever security rating services for compliance to allow customers to continually take the pulse of deployed security postures, compare against industry peers and assess their effectiveness in managing the security risks of the enterprise branch with direct internet connectivity.