Fortinet chalks up an SD-WAN win with Telenor Sweden

Fortinet continues to make in-roads into the SD-WAN sector, announcing on Tuesday that it has struck a deal with Telenor Sweden.

While Fortinet initially made its mark as a security vendor that worked with pure-play SD-WAN companies, last year it started offering its own flavor of SD-WAN backed by its security portfolio. That decision has made Fortinet both a friend of the SD-WAN companies that it partners with, and an enemy as it works to win its own SD-WAN business.

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Comcast Business announced last week it was using Fortinet to provide cybersecurity for its mid-sized and enterprise customers that use its software-defined networking-based ActiveCore platform. On the other end of the business, Windstream Enterprises expanded its SD-WAN portfolio in June with an additional solution backed by Fortinet.

Companies such as Telenor Sweden find Fortinet an attractive option for deploying SD-WAN because security is top of mind for telcos and their end customers. Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN allows Telenor to pick from a range of secure, application-based WAN technologies that includes both broadband and 4G/LTE connectivity.

In Sweden, there are more than 3,000 companies with at least 50 employees, and three locations that are looking to evolve their WAN solutions to include safer access to internal and external applications, according to Telenor Sweden.

With organizations moving their workloads to the cloud via their branch locations, there are more attack surfaces across IoT and bring-your-own-devices in the workplace, all of which creates multiple network edges that are located beyond the WAN edge.

“Advanced security was a top priority for Telenor when it came to executing our vision for a secure, flexible and cost-effective SD-WAN managed service offering,” said Tomas Flodin, product owner of SD-WAN at Telenor. “We chose Fortinet because they enable us to consolidate NGFW security and SD-WAN services into the same platform, giving us the peace of mind that we would have the level of visibility, control and security needed to effectively protect our customers’ data and applications using our SD-WAN service.”

Telenor is using a range of Fortinet firewalls for both security and to enable the SD-WAN services. The service also includes FortiExtender, which enables the 3G and 4G connectivity and FortiManager, which delivers SD-WAN and security management and APIs.