Fortinet expands the Security Fabric with Enhanced SD WAN Capabilities

Fortinet recently announced the latest expansion of its Security Fabric, featuring enhanced SD-WAN functionality that is integrated with Fortinet’s proven security capabilities. FortiOS version 5.6 consolidates advanced security with software-defined networking functions. This integration enables distributed enterprises to simplify their infrastructures, reduce WAN costs and securely provide their users with direct access to the public cloud, datacenter and SaaS services they need to successfully compete in the digital economy.

Facing the increasing access and connectivity demands of today’s digital economy, businesses are looking to SD-WAN solutions to overcome the limited scale, higher costs and increased complexity characteristic of traditional WAN architectures. Despite these advantages, many enterprises are hesitant to adopt SD-WAN solutions due to the security concerns of allowing direct access to sensitive SaaS services and data, along with rising threat trends like SSL encrypted malware, ransomware and an ever-increasing volume of advanced intrusion attempts.

High-Performance Security for SD-WAN

Fortinet’s enhanced SD-WAN solutions address these challenges by consolidating its Security Fabric protections with SD-WAN functionality to reduce complexity without sacrificing security effectiveness or network performance. Deployment options include FortiGate Enterprise Firewalls and FortiHypervisors to give distributed enterprises the flexibility to tailor implementations to meet their individual security and networking needs.

Fortinet delivers these enhanced SD-WAN capabilities leveraging its proprietary Security Processing Unit to accelerate security and networking-specific tasks. This optimized architecture delivers deep security analysis and inspection capabilities that meet and exceed enterprise-class, general-purpose CPUs that power competing products.

• Scalable and secure VPN performance is critical for distributed enterprises to connect their global users and branch offices to sensitive corporate resources. Fortinet delivers the Industry’s highest AES-256 encrypted and IPSecured VPN throughput with the scale to support thousands of distributed branch offices and locations.
• Fortinet’s latest threat research report found that more than 50% of enterprise traffic is encrypted which blocks traffic visibility and hinders optimized SD-WAN routing. Fortinet enhanced SD-WAN supports industry mandated SSL encryption ciphers and delivers the industry’s highest SSL inspection throughput to ensure that SSL traffic is delivered securely and efficiently.
• Fortinet is the only vendor capable of providing these high-performance security capabilities for SD-WAN.

Optimized SD-WAN with Security Fabric Control and Visibility

Distributed enterprises can leverage the benefits of centralized management, visibility and automation capabilities of the Fortinet Security Fabric to reduce complexity and increase IT efficiency. Fortinet enhanced SD-WAN includes zero-touch deployment options and new orchestration and service chaining capabilities.

• Expanded Fabric Topology visualizations that enable distributed enterprises to dynamically monitor both the physical and logical network topology and link utilization.
• Complete visibility into the applications and users on the network arms IT with information on traffic patterns and utilization so they can intelligently allocate IT resources.
• Integrated Smart WAN Link Load balancing and granular health monitoring metrics enable distributed enterprises to select the most efficient route for their business-critical traffic and automatically reroutes traffic if the connection degrades.
• Dynamic Cloud application data-base supports hundreds of SaaS applications and dynamically updates IP addresses to enable efficient routing and reduces IT troubleshooting.

Rajesh Maurya, Regional Vice President, India & SAARC at Fortinet

“Increasing adoption of public cloud requires Wide Area Networking infrastructures that can reliably and efficiently connect branch offices to corporate resources. SD-WAN technology offers flexible connectivity options, quality of service features, automated network connection services and simplified deployment to keep up with the shifts in enterprise traffic usage. The benefits and capabilities of SD-WAN are now built into FortiOS 5.6 to deliver a seamlessly integrated solution that simplifies our customers’ transition to a more flexible, scalable and secure software-defined network infrastructure.”

Security Fabric Ecosystem of SD-WAN Partners

The open nature of the Security Fabric gives distributed enterprises the flexibility of leveraging Fortinet’s expanding ecosystem of Fabric-Ready SD-WAN partners. Fortinet’s well-defined APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) enable deep integration with the Fortinet Security Fabric and partners undergo solution validation with a commitment to ongoing interoperability as part of the program. The Fabric Ready program simplifies implementation and operation of multi-vendor SD-WAN architectures.

Availability

Fortinet’s enhanced SD-WAN features will be included in the FortiOS version 5.6 update available April 11.