Fortinet Adds New SD-WAN Services to Portfolio for the Modern Enterprise

Supporting IT operations in 2023 is as important – arguably much more important – as it was twenty years ago. Networks are more complex, technologies have evolved to the point of near-incalculable vastness, users expect more, and bad actors are on the rise. Secure connectivity and streamlined services aren’t just ideal for businesses; they are quintessential.

Part and parcel with this goes SD-WAN, which has proven to be transformative across the networking landscape. SD-WAN enhances three of the biggest green flags in ITOps today; agility, efficiency, and scalability. It optimizes traffic routing while prioritizing key applications, and it bolsters security through centralized policies and encryption, thus safeguarding data in transit.

The long story short? SD-WAN can make QoS and network administration a breeze.

So, that’s exactly how the topic of SD-WAN links to the following news:

For more than 20 years, Fortinet has worked to be a driving force in the convergence of networking and cybersecurity. Securing people, devices and data everywhere is its core mission, and its portfolio of more than 50 enterprise-grade products speaks to that; just earlier today, a colleague of mine wrote on MSP Today about Fortinet and its focuses on detection, containment, investigation and response.

And now, Fortinet (News - Alert) has announced an expansion of its services portfolio with two new SD-WAN services.

To support ITOps teams in achieving efficiencies while enhancing every possible user experience, Fortinet has introduced an Underlay Performance Monitoring Service for SD-WAN. Enabled by FortiManager and FortiGuard’s database of hundreds of popular SaaS (News - Alert) and cloud designations, this service offers centralized visibility into the underlay performance of the entire network, facilitating critical sorting and reporting of ISP link performance. In practice, this empowers IT teams to prioritize network traffic and aptly address must-handle operational issues. (This also includes FortiGuard’s Performance SLA Database, including hundreds of preconfigured SaaS and cloud app workloads so customers can easily create SLAs. This reduces setup time, curbs configuration errors, etc.)

In addition to Underlay Performance Monitoring Service for SD-WAN, the second new service is Fortinet’s Overlay-as-a-Service for SD-WAN. This purpose-built offering for, as Fortinet describes, “lean organizations with limited technical expertise, constrained budgets, and more.”

The “and more” there includes the facilitation of rapid deployment and interconnection off locations within minutes, cutting needs for self-hosting or dedicated hubs. Overlay-as-a-Service makes it so setup and management are handled through FortiCloud; this reduces deployment time and associated costs while alleviating burdens via a smooth, cloud-hosted service. Notably, Overlay-as-a-Service further automates integration with FortiSASE too, enabling SD-WAN hubs to quickly connect with Fortinet SASE points of presence (POPs) for Secure Private Access.

"At Fortinet, we empower IT teams to simplify operations and enhance user experience by addressing today’s most pressing SD-WAN pain points,” said John Maddison, CMO and EVP of Product Strategy at Fortinet. “Our new services make SD-WAN even more accessible to organizations with limited resources, offloading the technical expertise of setting up, configuring, maintaining, and running an SD-WAN network to Fortinet experts."