News

Fortinet Offers Secure SD-WAN for Multi-Cloud

• By David Ramel
• 07/16/2020

With multi-cloud implementations becoming the enterprise norm, cybersecurity specialist Fortinet unveiled a new software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) offering targeting those scenarios.

The firm, citing a lack of expertise and skilled IT and cybersecurity talent in most organizations, unveiled Fortinet Secure SD-WAN for Multi-Cloud to ease the establishment of secure and high-performance connectivity between Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) workloads running in multiple public cloud, private cloud, and on-premises environments.

Fortinet said its offering improves on the typical scenario of enterprises connecting their clouds via their on-premises data center WAN edge. "The use of this type of traditional WAN infrastructure approach, though secure, inhibits multi-cloud capabilities and results in deployment complexity, inconsistent network performance, and expensive connectivity," the company said.

Working on all major cloud providers, the solution is said to improve on that approach with a consistent network architecture leveraging SD-WAN capabilities between clouds while empowering application developers and enterprise IT to build a high-speed and seamless cloud-to-cloud network and security architecture with benefits including:

• Automating the deployment of a consistent overlay network across different cloud networks, reducing complexity and increasing agility to save teams time and resources.
• Offering end-to-end visibility, control, and centralized management that unifies functionality across multiple cloud environments through cloud native integrations.
• Securely transporting application traffic between clouds without needing to backhaul through the data center, enabling better scaling of deployments and reducing latency.
• Intelligently selecting connections based on application characteristics employing dynamic path selection, improving performance and optimizing cost by selecting the best internet or leased line link.
• Providing an application developer-friendly API to enable programmers the ability to consistently represent their network and security requirements.

The new offering is delivered via FortiGate-VM, a virtual appliance.

While Fortinet emphasizes security in its offerings, many other vendors also tout secure SD-WAN implementations for multi-cloud deployments, including Cisco, Apcela, Juniper Networks, Talari, Aryaka and others.