Fortinet, a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, has announced a business benefit analysis of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and its ability to support large enterprises by delivering a 300% return in investment over three years and payback in eight months.

“Large enterprises around the world continue to turn to Fortinet to achieve their digital acceleration goals with solutions that converge networking and security. We’re pleased that Forrester has quantified both the network and security benefits of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, which will advance our commitment to helping customers make informed decisions with validated solutions.” — John Maddison, executive vice president of products and chief marketing officer at Fortinet

As one of the top SD-WAN vendors, Fortinet commissioned a Total Economic Impact (TEI) study by Forrester Consulting to analyse the value that Fortinet Secure SD-WAN can provide to large enterprises, examining both the network and security impact on customers’ businesses.

As part of the independent study, Forrester interviewed business decision makers with experience across industries and geographies, including retail, healthcare, financial services and manufacturing. Collectively, the organisations deployed Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and other Fortinet products, such as switches, wireless LAN and wireless WAN, and have more than US$1-billion in annual revenue, up to 8 500 sites, and up to 133 000 employees.

Based on customer feedback, Forrester developed a composite model for the study and built out a three-year financial model to reflect the costs and benefits of the investment.

Key findings from the study and benefits for customers include:

Eight months payback and 300% ROI: Customers deploying Fortinet Secure SD-WAN achieved a 300% return on investment over three years with payback in eight months. These benefits include a reduction in communications costs, increased productivity of security and network teams, improved network and security performance, and increased productivity of deployment teams.
65% reduction in network disruption: With enhanced network performance enabled by Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, business users experienced a 65% reduction in the number of network disruptions.
50% improvement in resolving issues: Fortinet offers increased visibility and effective, broad protection, allowing security and network teams to identify and remediate network issues more quickly. Improving time to issue resolution by as much as 50% enabled the composite organisation to reassign security and network team resources to higher value activities, resulting in a three-year, risk-adjusted productivity benefit of $1.4-million.
Increased productivity of deployment team: Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enabled the composite organisation to save time by 75% per new deployment, resulting in significant efficiencies for the deployment team.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN transforms and secures WAN

Prior to implementing Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, the organisations used a combination of technologies and vendors to manage, maintain and monitor their networks. These solutions, which relied on MPLS, Internet and assorted hardware, lacked visibility and adequate security coverage, forcing network engineers and administrators to spend excessive time identifying and resolving unanticipated problems on an ad hoc basis. Additionally, scaling and modifying existing solutions became increasingly cost-prohibitive and time-consuming.

To learn more about the additional benefits of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN based on real customer feedback, download The Total Economic Impact of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN study.

Additional analyst recognition and customer validation of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN

In addition to these findings from the independent Forrester study, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has received industry recognition and momentum throughout the year. Fortinet was named a Leader in the 2022 Gartner Magic Quadrant for SD-WAN for the third consecutive year, placing highest in the quadrant for its ability to execute.

Furthermore, Fortinet is the only vendor to have been ranked first in three of the five use cases in the 2022 Gartner Critical Capabilities for SD-WAN report for the past two years for Remote Worker, Security-Sensitive WAN and WAN for Small Branches.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN also received positive validation from its customers. Fortinet was named a Customers’ Choice in the March 2022 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer”: WAN Edge Infrastructure report — for the third year in a row — in recognition of the reviews that customers voluntarily submit about their experience with Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution.