Branch-to-cloud connectivity in Fortinet Secure SD-WAN

Optimising Fortinet Secure SD-WAN connectivity

Many businesses have embraced SD-WAN and internet connections as a means of simplifying their IT connectivity. However, dependence on end-to-end internet connections to key services and resources can impact application performance, availability, and security.

With Fortinet Secure SD-WAN available on MVE, customers can now host localised virtual SD-WAN controllers on Megaport’s global platform and reduce the distance data traverses over internet paths from branch locations to critical services in public or private clouds and even other branch locations. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN accelerates edge to cloud connectivity and multicloud interconnectivity without compromising security. 

Once connected, Fortinet customers can now access Megaport’s leading ecosystem of more than 700 enabled data centres worldwide, over 360 service providers, and 220+ cloud on-ramps. 

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN on MVE highlights:

• Reduced cloud egress costs to cloud on-ramps when compared to internet rates.
• Better performance with reduced jitter and latency.
• Globally distributed for localised connections.
• Point-and-click network provisioning to support interconnection between branch locations, data centres, cloud providers, and IT services.
• Real-time provisioning of virtual network infrastructure and interconnections.
• No hardware to ship, install, or manage.
• Unified end-to-end network provisioning and management to transform legacy networks.
• Secure, multicloud connections to the world’s leading clouds such as Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Oracle Cloud, and Salesforce.

“As a Fabric-Ready Partner, Megaport is able to provide its customers a pre-validated joint solution that is integrated with Fortinet’s industry-leading Secure SD-WAN solution,” said John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet. “Megaport is leveraging the simplicity and orchestration benefits of Fortinet’s SD-WAN solution to provide customers secure, seamless, and superior quality of user experience.”

Transforming networking at the edge

MVE is a globally distributed compute and network service in one. The compute aspect of the service enables customers to host NFV instances in locations where they need them, on demand, and manage them in a point-and-click manner. On the network side, MVE’s built-in transit gateway provides a highly scalable access point for connecting networks, via the public internet, to Megaport’s private SDN. Virtualised devices hosted on MVE can utilise the transit gateway to create connections between the Megaport SDN and their own networks, including branch locations, data centres, and private cloud.

MVE is currently available in 21 metros across North America, Asia-Pacific, and Europe. This allows customers more flexibility to deploy virtual devices near concentrations of users to localise traffic and optimise data termination for performance.

“As businesses rapidly adopt SD-WAN technology, the ability for customers to easily host virtual instances of Fortinet SD-WAN orchestrators around the world on our platform will significantly improve edge network connectivity for global organisations,” said Vincent English, CEO of Megaport. “Having Fortinet’s SD-WAN solutions fully integrated into Megaport’s global Software Defined Network allows our customers to optimise their SD-WAN connectivity and improve overall network and application performance at the fraction of the cost of traditional connectivity methods.”