John Maddison, SVP – Products & Solutions – Fortinet

SD-WAN plays a pivotal role in realizing the true benefits of digital transformation, but security is often an afterthought. Fortinet has developed best-of-breed SD-WAN functionality fully integrated with best-of-breed security, making it an obvious choice for customers demanding both. In fact, SD-WAN functionality is built in to every Fortinet NGFW/UTM Firewall as part of the baseline operating system. Organizations will increasingly look to SD-WAN to provide high-performance cloud access as a business-critical requirement. The direct cloud access, application performance and industry-leading security provided by Fortinet SD-WAN is resonating with our customers and we believe this is a key reason Fortinet is winning major WAN edge opportunities.”

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Fortinet (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced their inclusion in Gartner’s first Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure as a Challenger with the furthest placement for completeness of vision in the Challengers quadrant. Fortinet believes this placement is largely due to its commitment to developing advanced SD-WAN functionality blended with a fully integrated security strategy and its focus on automation to simplify networking and security operations for enterprise organizations.

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Digital transformation is dramatically changing enterprise WAN connectivity. Rapid adoption of cloud demands enterprise branches to be more agile, flexible and secure, while organizations are also experiencing growth in global collaboration and traffic volumes. As a result, many enterprises are embracing SD-WAN as an alternative over their legacy WAN infrastructure solutions. SD-WAN offers important benefits associated with new digital business requirements such as direct cloud access, better application performance, increased agility and lower costs. But it also comes with security challenges, as traffic is no longer routed through the corporate data center and protected by next-generation firewalls. To address these challenges while providing leading SD-WAN functionality, Fortinet SD-WAN provides a number of benefits, including:

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• Built-in Advanced SD-WAN Functionality: FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls all include built-in SD-WAN functionality combined with enterprise-class security. For Fortinet’s 300,000+ existing customers, a total of over three million devices currently deployed can be made SD-WAN-ready with just a software upgrade.
• Leader in Next-Generation Firewall Security: Fortinet SD-WAN, which is integrated into the FortiGate next-gen firewall, offers branches the ability to inspect SSL traffic for malware and detect malware attacks using URL filtering, IPS, antivirus and sandboxing. Gartner has also recognized Fortinet as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for Enterprise Network Firewalls.
• Automation with Business Intent: Fortinet SD-WAN enables enterprises to translate high-level business policies into the application and user-level policies. Automation is tied into the solution, all the way from dynamically choosing the best WAN path to orchestration and provisioning using REST APIs. In this case, with the help of automation, Fortinet enables enterprises to increase team productivity—something that is critical during an era of acute cybersecurity skills shortages.
• Single-Pane-of-Glass for SD-Branch: Fortinet is one of the few vendors that can manage both networking and security from a centralized location. Fortinet further simplifies branch office management by providing the capability to manage WLAN and Ethernet switches to enable SD-Branch.

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To deliver even more security efficacy, Fortinet’s SD-WAN solution is integrated into the Fortinet Security Fabric. The hallmark of the Security Fabric is its ability to seamlessly integrate across multiple networked ecosystems to deliver broad protection and visibility to every network segment, device and appliance, whether virtual, in the cloud or on-premises. With more than 360,000 customers worldwide, and an install base of three million devices that can be made SD-WAN-ready with just a software upgrade, the FortiGate NGFW’s high VPN scalability, patented virtual domain functionality for multi-tenancy, zero-touch provisioning and centralized management greatly help enterprises with scalable and flexible WAN deployments.