Would your business benefit from SD-WAN?

Are you a mid-market organization with multiple locations, multiple cloud services, and a complex network?

If so, you would benefit from learning more about SD-WAN.

Businesses are no longer “traditional”. We have more locations, more devices, more remote workers, and a lot of electronic data and applications on-premise and in the cloud.  We also have better internet speeds and more options at lower costs. 

Companies with complex networks are looking for efficiency and simplicity. Technology has improved tremendously and the availability and use of more secure “Next-Generation” technology and expanding cloud options push companies to look for improvements in automation and flexibility.

Prioritization

Your business and cloud applications can be prioritized with SD-WAN, giving you control and making sure your vital business applications get top priority.

Efficient Use of Internet Connections

Instead of having 1 main connection and a backup failover connection, you can aggregate your multiple internet connections and prioritize traffic to improve bandwidth, availability and resilience. 

Cost Savings

Cost is a major driver in the migration to SD-WAN.  Typical savings range from 20-40% over traditional WAN technology.  With improvements in bandwidth, the savings will grow.  You also have softer cost savings in terms of engineering resources and reduced downtime with multi-link balancing and failover.

SD-WAN can reduce the often-growing cost of MPLS. SD-WAN can automate application traffic routing based on real-time monitoring.  It can route traffic over multiple data services (MPLS, Cable, 4G/LTE, etc) and boost capacity of less expensive data services.

Calculate your potential savings using this Secure SD-WAN ROI Calculator from Fortinet

https://www.fortinet.com/products/sd-wan#secure-sdwan-roi-calculator

Simplified Operations

Here are five requirements for a Secure SD-WAN solution that’s flexible, scalable, and fit for the needs of today’s distributed enterprises. (fortinet.com)

It goes beyond the branch.

SD-WAN is perhaps best understood for supporting complex branch deployments and helping organizations reduce their reliance on branch routers and other legacy technologies. Effective SD-WAN solutions go well beyond branch office needs, however. Their functionality can extend to the home office and teleworker use—especially appliances with built-in LTE for consistent connectivity—and among distributed clouds. SD-WAN solutions also need to come in virtual versions that are available in multi-cloud environments and have deeper integration to enable cloud on-ramp, enabling efficient SaaS adoption.

It offers intuitive orchestration and zero-touch deployments.

Both of these features enable faster configuration rollouts at scale, often within minutes, to enable the best possible performance of collaboration applications such as VoIP, videoconferencing, and various SaaS applications, even for remote users based far away from the corporate data center. Orchestration enables overlay (VPN) automation for the most complex network with intuitive workflows.

It prioritizes critical applications and enables self-healing WAN.

Connectivity alone isn’t enough, especially in a remote work-heavy environment. A solution needs to identify a broad set of applications to meet all use cases, while advanced self-healing WAN automation will provide consistent user experience on any transport for any user. Many SD-WAN solutions only support limited use cases, limited numbers of users, and/or specific environments. Caveat emptor.

It includes integrated security.

The difference between SD-WAN and Secure SD-WAN is that the latter is a solution, while the former is a connectivity offering providing another conduit for the bad guys to attack your network. An overlay security solution can’t adapt to dynamic connectivity environments; security needs to be embedded into each SD-WAN device, enabling home users, branch office users, and the data center to use a common set of security policies and enforcement criteria. In true Secure SD-WAN, networking, connectivity, and security functions are so tightly integrated they’re the one solution meeting three needs, instead of three discrete solutions.

It offers comprehensive analytics and reporting.

A Secure SD-WAN solution needs to help organizations gain visibility into network and application performance (both real-time and historical statistics). That includes enhanced analytics as well as enhanced compliance. A single console and rich SD-WAN analytics can help customers fine-tune their business and security policies to improve the quality of experience for all users.

Not all SD-WANs are the same.

Why Fortinet?

Fortinet is recognized as a challenger with the highest ability to execute in the 2019 Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enables organizations to solve the secure communications problem for distributed locations quickly and easily. It is easy to manage, agile, reliable, flexible, and ultimately secure. Fortinet is the only vendor with a custom-designed ASIC to provide the fastest application identification and steering in the industry while providing connectivity and advanced security capabilities 10 times faster than the competition. Fortinet is the market-share leader in providing security solutions to the distributed organization.

Key Differentiators

The SD-WAN market has become overcrowded, and there is a lot of noise that confuses customers.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN delivers the lowest TCO at $5 per 749 Mbps—eight times better than the average TCO from all other vendors. *2

Unlike most SD-WAN vendors, Fortinet provides fully integrated security.

Fortinet received a second consecutive SD-WAN “Recommended” rating in the NSS Labs SD-WAN Group Test Report. *3

*2 “Fortinet Receives Second Consecutive NSS Labs Recommended Rating in SD-WAN Group Test Report,” Fortinet, June 19, 2019.

*3 Ibid.

Fortinet Case Study – https://www.fortinet.com/content/dam/fortinet/assets/case-studies/cs-batteries-plus.pdf