Fortinet named fastest growing SD-WAN vendor, continues innovation to deliver SD-WAN

Fortinet has announced new market share figures and continued SD-WAN innovation with its newest SD-WAN appliance, FortiGate 80F.

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO, Fortinet, said, “With the increase in work from home and adoption of multi-cloud, a truly effective SD-WAN solution must be able to be implemented anywhere. Fortinet’s dedication to SD-WAN innovation has resulted in the industry’s most extensive and secure SD-WAN solution, able to be deployed across the home, branch, campus and multi-cloud. Fortinet’s continued positive trajectory in the SD-WAN market is a testament to our ability to deliver the best application experience and cost savings for our customers.”

Fortinet delivers true secure SD-WAN

A true secure SD-WAN solution—such as Fortinet Secure SD-WAN—consolidates advanced routing, integrated next-generation firewall (NGFW), self-healing SD-WAN capabilities, and intuitive orchestration into a single, organically developed solution. It provides infrastructure and operations leaders with robust WAN capabilities that support dynamic path selection of the latest high-performance digital applications while significantly simplifying and automating operations across home, branch, campus and multi-cloud. Fortinet’s ability to deliver SD-WAN anywhere and support diverse use cases has helped the vendor standout and lead in the market.

Market momentum and support for key SD-WAN use cases

Fortinet has again been named the fastest growing SD-WAN vendor in the latest Omdia report (“Omdia Market Share: Data Center Network Equipment Q1 2020”). The report notes 247 per cent year-over-year growth in Fortinet’s SD-WAN revenue.

Additionally, according to Gartner market share data, Fortinet has had the highest revenue growth change in SD-WAN equipment market share worldwide between 1Q19-1Q20. Fortinet currently sits as the second highest vendor based on revenue for SD-WAN hardware worldwide for 1Q20, according to the latest Gartner market share report. (1) The same report counts Fortinet amongst the highest three vendors in worldwide market share for SD-WAN equipment by revenue for 1Q20. Fortinet attributes this market momentum to its ability to deliver SD-WAN anywhere – from home to branch to cloud – and support a variety of diverse use cases, including:

• Complex Fortune 1000 deployments: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enables customers to achieve business agility with flexible and robust SD-WAN, security and optimisation in an integrated solution. This allows global wide area networks with distributed branch offices to avoid and overcome network impairments such as congestion, latency and packet loss to self-heal and improve performance. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers application-centric implementation and centralised end-to-end orchestration with automation to simplify operations and reduce time and cost to deploy, provision and manage change. More on Fortinet’s ability to support complex Fortune 1000 deployments from customer Kevin Morrison, VP ITC Operations at Rollins:

“Fortinet Secure SD-WAN addressed our connectivity, security and management challenges with a comprehensive solution supporting advanced routing, SD-WAN and security in a single appliance. With integrated SD-WAN functionality and security, we are able to simultaneously improve application performance and our overall security posture. The current state of the world has really re-emphasised the positive impact of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN for us. We were quickly able to support remote employees and ensure continued connectivity globally, and we have also still been able to remotely test, implement, and deploy Fortinet solutions in our branch offices.”

• Cloud-centric WAN: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides accelerated cloud access with capabilities for cloud on-ramp to seamlessly connect overlay tunnels to multi-cloud. With internet primarily used to access cloud workloads, Fortinet’s integrated advanced security provides secure access, automation and visibility into cloud applications. It also enables SD-WAN between clouds and empowers enterprise IT to build a seamless cloud-to-cloud network and security architecture. More on Fortinet’s ability to support Cloud-centric WAN from customer Dirk van Gelderen, Group Information Security Officer at De Heus Animal Nutrition:
  “The ability to on-ramp our branch offices to the cloud through Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enables us to extend last mile optimisation to all users. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN helped us improve user experience and effectively connect to our multi-cloud environment.”

• Large scale, compact footprint: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers integrated WAN edge, WiFi, LTE and security functions to securely connect end-users to critical applications over direct internet links. This provides reliable application access with intelligent traffic steering, failover and consistent policy enforcement for compliance. With intuitive orchestration and zero touch provisioning, replication of business policies at-scale across distributed branch offices is simplified to reduce deployment cycles at limited staff hours. More on Fortinet’s ability to support large scale, compact footprint deployments from customer Miguel Raúl González, IT Operations Management Director at Grupo Universal:
  “The shift from a communications infrastructure to Fortinet solutions was key for us. We achieved centralised management that provides greater control over each of our branch locations. The integrated Security Fabric has also helped improve external and internal cyberattack detection within our infrastructure. Single-pane-of-glass management has unified our patch management and helps manage FortiGate appliances. In addition, we have optimised bandwidth thanks to Secure SD-WAN, which has saved us USD$70,000 per year.”

New FortiGate 80F

Fortinet continues to innovate and expand its product portfolio with the announcement of a new Secure SD-WAN appliance – FortiGate 80F – powered by Fortinet’s purpose-built SD-WAN ASIC in a desktop form factor, with built-in bypass interfaces to deliver reliable connectivity during planned or un-planned outages. FortiGate 80F supports complex Fortune 1000 deployments with the industry’s best performance, automated overlay at-scale and advanced networking capabilities to achieve the highest possible quality of experience. FortiGate 80F is also available with built-in WiFi or built-in POE, making it perfect for WAN edge and branch consolidation to support large scale, compact footprint deployments.

Security Compute Rating is a benchmark that compares the performance of Fortinet’s purpose-built ASIC-based next-generation firewall appliances to other NGFW and SD-WAN vendors in that same price range that utilise generic CPUs for networking and security capabilities. The FortiGate 80F powered by Fortinet’s SOC4 security processor, highlights the security processor advantage, enabling the following Security Compute Ratings: