Fortinet, the driving force in the evolution of cybersecurity and the convergence of networking and security, has announced significant cloud-delivered enhancements to FortiSASE, the most integrated single-vendor SASE solution on the market.

“Fortinet delivers the most integrated single-vendor SASE solution available, uniquely converging best-of-breed networking and best-of-breed security that are unified by a single operating system. The latest cloud-delivered enhancements to FortiSASE further strengthen our ability to enable consistent security and user experience no matter where users and applications are distributed.” — John Maddison, executive vice president of products and chief marketing officer

According to Gartner, single-vendor SASE “delivers converged network and security capabilities to connect and secure distributed users, devices and locations to resources in the cloud, edge and on premises”.¹ It has emerged as a key architecture to secure remote users, ensure consistent user experience, and shift from a capex to an opex business model. In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2025, a third of new SASE deployments will be based on a single-vendor SASE offering, up from 10% in 2022.¹

Fortinet was recognised by Gartner as a Representative Vendor in the inaugural Market Guide for Single-Vendor SASE. FortiSASE consolidates point products by seamlessly converging cloud-delivered networking (SD-WAN) and cloud-delivered security (SSE composed of secure Web gateway, Universal ZTNA (zero trust network access), cloud access security broker (CASB), and firewall-as-a-service) via a single operating system (FortiOS) and single agent (FortiClient), with AI and ML layered across to drive additional operational efficiency.

What’s new?

In addition to enabling secure Internet access that is not only fast but ensures consistent security for all user traffic to and from the Internet, FortiSASE now includes new updates that add enhanced support for secure private access and secure SaaS access use cases:

Secure private access
Leveraging its success of delivering networking and security convergence at the edge to over 20 000 customers via Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, Fortinet is now extending this convergence to remote users via cloud-delivered SD-WAN connectivity in FortiSASE. This extends Fortinet’s existing ability to deliver granular application access with Fortinet Universal ZTNA by adding broader application access with SD-WAN to support the most comprehensive set of private applications running at the data centre or public cloud, while also ensuring superior user experience. This enhancement makes FortiSASE the industry’s most flexible architecture for secure and reliable access to privately hosted applications by leveraging both ZTNA and SD-WAN.

With today’s news, organisations that have already deployed Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and/or FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls in the branch or data centre can seamlessly connect their remote users to FortiSASE for private access without needing an additional licence.

Secure SaaS access
FortiSASE delivers comprehensive visibility and control for SaaS applications, now enhanced with next-generation dual-mode CASB. By leveraging both inline and API-based support, FortiSASE enables full visibility into sanctioned and unsanctioned applications to address shadow IT and data exfiltration challenges.

“Modern IT and employee environments are highly distributed and require secure connectivity and access, regardless of where users or applications are located. To provide these services, organizations must have comprehensive, tightly integrated, network and security solutions. Fortinet understands this and has implemented a single OS and agent across its entire Cloud-based SASE portfolio, plus it has layered in AI/ML technologies to drive greater operational efficiencies and deliver enhanced user experiences.” — Bob Laliberte, principal analyst, ESG