I had the privilege to be on the NFD20 panel in early 2019. Lots of vendors presented about their cool products, and shared their product updates. This blog is based on Fortinet’s presentation on Secure SD-WAN, and summarizes the important updates from Fortinet.

Fortinet Company and Product Updates
The presentation started with the company update by Nirav Shah. Some of the key updates are:

1. Fortinet invests heavily in research and patents. They have more than 600 patents.
2. Fortinet was among the top 5 performing stocks in 2018. They have had 2 billion dollars in billings and 20% growth year over year.
3. Fortinet has sold over 4.4 million devices globally.
4. In addition to Fortigate, Fortinet also sells Switches and Access Points.
5. Fortinet participated in 9 tests including the one for SD-WAN and performed well as compared to their competitors.
6. Fortigate is Frotinet’s flagship product. Fortinet’s philosophy is to develop new features like SD-WAN, Segmentation, etc. on the existing Fortigate product.
7. Fortinet has developed custom ASICs to suit their needs. The ASICs have Network Processor (NP) and Content Processor (CP).
8. Fortinet has built a parallel path processing in their ASCIs to give the best performance. Under this architecture, an optimal path is chosen for a packet out of all available paths based on the firewall policies configured.
9. For the latest CP9, the performance degradation due to deep SSL inspection is 10-15% vs 70% for the competitors with similar hardware capabilities.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN Overview
Below is a summary of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN overview:

1. SD-WAN features are available on all the Fortigate appliances. These appliances are available in various size of hardware. The small desktop version devices also have many variations like 4G, WiFi, PoE, etc.
2. SD-WAN is a feature available on all the Fortigate devices. Existing customers can enable the features and get the benefits of SD-WAN.
3. SD-Branch – Fortinet’s AP and Switches integrate into Fortigate. From the management controller standpoint, the SSID from AP and ports of the Switch acts like they belong to Fortigate. This gives users a single point of management for their entire branch.
4. Virtual Domains that is a patented technology is used to create separate SD-WAN network segments. Every Virtual Domain needs its own WAN link.
5. Unlike some of their competitors, Fortinet does not have a centralized controller. However, the solution can scale to thousands of branches even without controller. The only limitation is the CPU and memory on the hardware. Bigger Fortigates can scale to more tunnels.
6. Fortinet strategy to convert all their Fortigate Firewalls at customers WAN edge has helped customers to reap SD-WAN benefits and have security features at the same time.

Concluding Thoughts
This was my first time looking at Fortinet product portfolio and SD-WAN in detail. I loved what I saw during the NFD20 presentation. Looking forward to learn more about Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN in future Tech Field Day presentations.

Check out the NFD20 Fortinet presentations at – https://techfieldday.com/appearance/fortinet-presents-at-networking-field-day-20/