Fortinet's Unique Approach to SD-WAN
28 July 2021 · 2 min read
Check out a blog post and interview that was published with Nirav Shah, VP of Prodcuts and Solutions with Fortinet. Thanks to Nirav and the crew at GestaltIT for having me on! It was really great to talk through all of the interesting things Fortinet is doing with their products to provide truly Secure SD-WAN.
Security and networking on one OS
Nirav's differentiator from day one was convergence: secure SD-WAN, with next-generation firewall, SD-WAN and zero trust all running on a single FortiOS and managed from one console. His argument was that cost reduction and user experience are only half the SD-WAN story, and the ransomware wave made the other half impossible to ignore. Having deployed enough SD-WAN alongside separate firewalls by that point, I did not need convincing that the integration matters.
ZTNA without another box
The news at the time was FortiOS 7.0's built-in access proxy, which Nirav described as the only SD-WAN with ZTNA in the same platform. The practical effect: the same policy engine that steers applications across the WAN also governs explicit, continuously verified access to those applications from wherever the user is, and none of it needs an additional license. That last point was his ROI pitch, and it is a fair one.
Cloud, branch and SASE
We covered cloud on-ramps to AWS, Azure and Google, the same SD-WAN running between clouds for multi-cloud and between workloads inside a cloud, and the SD-Branch story: FortiAP, FortiSwitch and FortiNAC integrated deeply enough that security policy extends down to the access layer and IoT devices show up in the same view. Retail and healthcare were the verticals he said were making that jump fastest. The purpose-built ASIC is what keeps the appliance from becoming the bottleneck when everything runs on one box. For remote users, FortiSASE delivers the same stack from the nearest point of presence, backed by FortiGuard Labs' threat intelligence, for the hybrid reality where some sites stay on-prem and some users never come back to the office.
Nirav's closing advice for anyone evaluating SD-WAN was to judge on two things: real return on the investment, and getting the security posture right at the same time rather than afterward.
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