SD-WAN Overview
A lot of companies are pursuing to shift from their outdated wide-area network (WAN) infrastructures to Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) models for remote workplaces as the usage of vitally important, cloud-based applications and equipment keeps enhancing.
Most decision taking authorities have started to prefer certain types of software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) due to the huge cost and complications of dependable wide-area connectivity in excess of conventional carrier-based networks.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN is capable of providing networking and security both in a one-stop solution. It also delivers application performance, superior security against threats and integrated administration.
Introduction - Fortinet Secure SD-WAN
We believe that Security should not be compromised while choosing the appropriate SD-WAN solution for a particular deployment. There are few choices for merging SD-WAN networking and advanced security but truly called Secure SD-WAN solution can be only one.
FortiGate NGFWs delivering Secure SD-WAN gives best performance for vitally important Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, digital voice and video tools also. Simultaneously Fortigate NGFW with SD-WAN help safeguard companies to oppose the modern threat impact and raising attacks.
As per predictions of IDC; global SD-WAN framework and services will reach $4.5 billion till 2022 by gaining over 40% of compound annual growth rate (CAGR).
Which Way to SD-WAN ?
SD-WAN provides the capability to leverage existing WAN services much better and cost-effectively by providing the liberty to involve closely with customers, improve business operations and innovations to users throughout the scattered businesses.
SD-WAN solutions will remain to be a strong growing sector for the expectable tomorrow as it has made WAN management more economical than before.
To fulfill this requirement, numerous SD-WAN solutions have been launched in the past several years but they were not equal enough.
SD-WAN professionals and business pundits believe that the best SD-WAN for an organisation relies on the business’s application performance needs, primary security, and IT expertise.
As branch offices are interacting straight away to the internet through broadband connectivity with SD-WAN; It is highly suggested that organisations must deploy a Next Generation Firewall Solution together with SD-WAN to tackle security challenges.
To fulfil these requirements, enterprises require extensive SD-WAN solution and Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has unique inbuilt security and the performance skills an SD-WAN implementation needs.
Fortinet Delivers Best-of-Breed SD-WAN
Particular WAN routers for WAN optimization and security appliances like secure web gateways (SWGs) and firewalls have been replaced by Fortinet Secure SD-WAN together with a single FortiGate NGFW.
This presents industry-best performance with abilities that consist of application awareness, automatic route intelligence, and WAN overlay assist for VPN.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides security forced networking for branch offices with advance results that contain automated path intelligence, application awareness and WAN overlay support for VPN.
1) Application Awareness for Improved Service Levels
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN is influenced by the modern SOC4 application-specific built-in circuit (ASIC) that delivers unique application recognition and quick application direction performance. This contains profound Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)/Transport Layer Security (TLS) monitoring with the minimized performance breakdown. Encryption control capabilities also cover the capability to check out the packet in order for the SD-WAN solution to efficiently route the traffic.
Technically, SD-WAN functions by routing applications across the most competent WAN connection at any moment. SD-WAN solutions shall be capable of detecting a wide area of applications and implement routing policies at a very atomic level to make sure best application performance. SaaS applications, voice and video can delay and obstruct end-user productivity without these skills.
By using an application control database with the signatures of more than 5,000 applications as well as everyday updates from FortiGuard Labs threat intelligence services; Fortinet Secure SD-WAN effectively tackle these challenges. It detects and sorts applications and also encrypt cloud application traffic from the first packet.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN identifies and ideally routes around 5,000 applications automatically.
FortiGate can be set to identify applications by business essentiality. Exclusive policies can be implemented at a granular level for sub applications for e.g. OneNote or Word within Office 365. Business-vital applications (like Salesforce, Office 365, SAP), ordinary productivity applications (like Dropbox), and social media applications (for e.g., Instagram, Twitter) can be granted separate routing precedence. This intense and wide application-level visibility within traffic patterns and utilization provides a best ability to distribute WAN resources as per organization requirement.
2) Effortless WAN Efficiency
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN significantly streamlines the process of upgrading traditional WAN infrastructures to deliver better application performance, best user experience, and enhanced protection. The FortiGate Secure SD-WAN solution imitates once WAN policies are applied based on application importance, performance needs, security strategies and many more factors. FortiGate NGFWs representing the SOC4 ASIC provide tenfold faster security performance than the competitors.
Below are the key features that FortiGate Secure SD-WAN provide when it comes to WAN efficiencies :
2a) Automated path intelligence
The latest SOC4 ASIC offers FortiGate Secure SD-WAN the rapid application directing in the security industry. Application awareness allows routing of most important applications throughout the network range on the basis of particular application and user. SD-WAN service-level agreements (SLAs) are simply specified by strongly choosing the superior WAN connection for the particular organization environment.
Enterprises can set out the standard of quality for less important to moderately important applications and the FortiGate will choose the equivalent link. Organizations can establish strong SLAs depending on consolidation of instability, loss of packets, and latency metrics for most important and business significant applications.
2b) WAN overlay
For users at branch locations; flexible overlay VPN skills provide a great WAN experience. Cloud overlay controller orchestration, supported by 360 Protection Bundle subscription services, eases overlay VPN deployment together with provisioning of cloud-based automation.
2c) Automatic failover
When the main WAN path degrades; Multi-path technology can automatically switchover to the best available link. FortiGate NGFW have this automation feature inbuilt that minimize difficulties for end users as well as improve their experience and productivity.
2d) WAN Path Remediation
WAN path remediation makes use of forward error correction (FEC) to beat negative WAN stipulations such as bad or noisy links. This improves data reliability and gives you a better user experience for applications like voice and video services. FEC improves the quality of real-time applications by providing error correction data to the outbound traffic and also enables the receiving end to recover from packet loss and other errors that occur in the course of transmission.
2e) Tunnel bandwidth aggregation
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN optimize network potential for applications that demand larger bandwidth. It associates two overlay tunnels to provide per-packet load balancing and delivery.
3) Simplified Management and Industry-Best TCO
It is a difficult situation often created for Network Engineers and Operation Leaders when it comes to deploy SD-WAN edge appliances to their various remote locations as well as branch offices. To send technicians at each location results in a very high cost for an enterprise and it also creates another challenge when technical staff is very limited. Although it’s insecure to transport fully configured devices. Also staff have to manage WAN optimization functions as well as security functions regularly from two distinct interfaces once the edge devices are implemented. FortiGate Secure SD-WAN solves both implementation and administration issues to minimize total cost of ownership (TCO).
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN acquired a 2nd direct “Recommended” rating in NSS Lab’s 2019 SD-WAN Group Test Performance by winning the minimum total cost of ownership (TCO) rating and emphasizing its quick zero-touch provisioning for efficient operations.
3a) Zero-touch deployment
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN’s easy deployment skills enable organizations to transport unconfigured FortiGate Next Generation Firewall devices to each remote location. The FortiGate connects to the FortiDeploy service in FortiCloud on its own when plugged in. FortiDeploy validates the remote appliance within seconds and connects it to a central FortiManager system.
3b) Single-pane-of-glass administration
FortiManager allows centralized view of all installed Secure SD-WAN-enabled FortiGate NGFWs throughout the scattered enterprises. To manage both the physical as well as logical network topologies at a top level and more specific view when required to check for any issues becomes effortless with Highly insightful display. Administrators can modify and distribute corporate WAN policies to all sites or reconfigure individual appliances.
VPNs can be established with simply one click for those users who need secure transmission through the public internet links. All this time saving and easy SD-WAN management (on-premises or through the cloud) reduces stress on lean community groups. Fortinet presents one of the only solutions that can manage SD-WAN networking, security, and access layer controls from the same administration console.
3c) TCO
Shifting to public broadband means that highly-priced MPLS connections can be swapped with more affordable solutions. FortiGate Secure SD-WAN provides best-of-breed TCO per Mbps together with zero-touch provisioning of new locations below six minutes. Organizations can use the complete available bandwidth through the usage of the connections in active-active mode with the Fortinet transport-agnostic solution.
As per NSS Labs testing report; FortiGate Secure SD-WAN offers industry-leading TCO for continuously second year.
Security-driven Networking
Fortinet provides industry-leading, certified SD-WAN that is powerful as well as secured. FortiGate NGFWs with the feature of SOC4 ASIC provide the speedy SD-WAN security performance in the industry. Fortinet received a second direct “Recommended” rating in NSS Lab’s 2019 “Software-Defined Wide Area Networking Test Report”.
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN has strong SD-WAN threat protection that includes Layer 3 through Layer 7 security controls which is not generally observed in other SD-WAN-plus-firewall solutions:
- Full threat protection, which includes firewall, intrusion prevention system (IPS), antivirus and application control
- Makes sure that businesses do not sacrifice throughput for complete threat protection by providing High-speed Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) / Transport Layer Security (TLS) deep-packet encryption observation with lowest performance breakdown
- Web filtering to implement internet security without the need of different Secure Web Gateway (SWG) device
- Exceptional VPN overlay performance feature for superior user experience and low latency provides best WAN throughput for cloud applications
Secure SD-WAN-enabled FortiGate NGFWs enhance the organisation’s standard security posture by supervising firewall rules and policies and demonstrating good practices. This serves to make compliance easy with security standards and privacy laws as well as enterprise regulations.
Automated auditing and reporting workflows saves time of staff and also lowers the risk of loopholes and errors.
Enabling the SD-Branch
In desire of a solution with profound consolidation and easy branch operations administration; Many organisation branches are prefering to concurrently exchange both their WAN and LAN devices. It increases branch complexity by using separate WAN and LAN infrastructures and also there are extra devices to install and update with more than one administration dashboard.
It also minimizes view and manipulation of process while growing the chances for security gaps that hackers can exploit. To resolve these issues, FortiGate Secure SD-WAN consists of an accelerated security extension to the access layer that allows SD-Branch modifications.
In a variable SD-WAN Market, Fortinet Is the Safe Bet
As cloud-based applications and tools like voice and video become more and more vital to disbursed businesses, FortiGate Secure SD-WAN can assist businesses take the advantages of digital transformation without constraining application performance, affecting end-user productivity, or stake data.
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN is extendable, more bandwidth-responsive, supporting businesses surely endorse more remote locations, business-critical applications, extra cloud services and anything else the branch network needs.
FortiGate Secure SD-WAN has been accepted globally in large-scale industries from finance to manufacturing, to retail, to client service, etc. Whether they want to facilitate a few hundred mobile endpoints or more than thousand of branch sites; FortiGate Secure SD-WAN customers are each achieving their own superior mix of industry-leading security and SD-WAN functionality.
Courtesy – Fortinet