Fortinet expands Universal SASE offering to empower today’s hybrid workforce

Fortinet announced the expansion of its Universal SASE offering to empower today’s hybrid workforce with FortiOS everywhere.

“The Fortinet operating system, FortiOS, is the industry’s only enterprise-grade converged operating system able to support all SASE functions, including firewall, SD-WAN, secure web gateway, encryption/decryption, CASB, DLP, and ZTNA, whether deployed in an appliance or cloud-delivered from Fortinet,” said Ken Xie, Chairman of the Board and CEO. “This approach enables over 30 converged networking and security functions to be managed through a single console. 14 of these functions are accelerated when deployed on our new FortiASIC Security Processor 5-based FortiGate 120G SASE appliance.”

Expanding Fortinet Universal SASE

Single-vendor SASE provides flexible access to critical resources and applications for users and devices. However, most enterprises rely on different vendors for each SASE function, which introduces significant challenges of controlling different operating system functionality and management consoles.

Fortinet Universal SASE takes traditional single-vendor SASE one step further, providing consistent policies and controls on-prem and in the cloud while delivering seamless integration across all functions and deployments to better support today’s hybrid workforce while reducing IT overhead.

FortiOS runs the full SASE stack, including a bi-directional firewall, SD-WAN, secure web gateway, encryption/decryption, CASB, DLP, and ZTNA. It also has the flexibility to run on an appliance in accelerated mode as well as in the FortiSASE cloud, providing consistent networking, security, and policy management for every edge. This is further enhanced by FortiGuard AI-powered Security Services, such as IPS, DNS filtering, URL filtering, anti-malware, sandboxing, and more.

This news expands Fortinet’s investment in Universal SASE by expanding the reach of its SASE stack in three key areas of the portfolio:

Worldwide coverage of FortiSASE cloud locations

FortiSASE, built on a global, scalable cloud network, delivers the same SASE stack as FortiGate appliances through its regional FortiSASE cloud locations. To deliver the best user experience and higher service availability, Fortinet now delivers over 100 FortiSASE cloud locations globally.

Bringing accelerated SASE to the campus and branch

To bring the full SASE stack to campus and branch locations, Fortinet is announcing the new FortiGate 120G SASE appliance. Because it is powered by Fortinet’s patented SP5 (Security Processor 5) custom ASIC, it can accelerate many elements of the SASE stack, such as delivering 3 Gbps of SSL inspection—an average of 6x faster than the industry average—for visibility into encrypted traffic at scale.

Flexible consumption extended to Universal SASE

FortiFlex, Fortinet’s flexible consumption program, has now been extended to Fortinet Universal SASE solutions. The entire SASE stack from Fortinet can be consumed as part of FortiFlex, whether customers want to use on-prem or FortiSASE cloud-based services.

FortiFlex offers usage-based licensing across cloud, hybrid cloud, and on-premises deployments to give IT teams the flexibility to continually right-size their deployments, reduce excessive procurement cycles for new security solutions, simplify the deployment and provisioning of new services, and maximize budget and ROI by enabling IT teams to scale down or pause services as needed.