Fortinet teamed up with Microsoft to drive its SD-WAN and next-generation firewalls into the Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN) today. The security vendor claims the integration will enable customers to extend consistent security policies across their WAN whether they’re connecting to an on-premises data center, a workload running in Azure, or between clouds.

vWAN is Microsoft’s cloud on-ramp and it allows customers to extend their SD-WAN overlays to workloads and services running on Azure. The service allows customers to treat cloud workloads like any other branch or data center. It also enables enterprises to use Azure's private backbone as an alternative to MPLS by routing traffic between cloud data centers, a capability Fortinet claims is in high demand among its customer base.

One of the challenges customers are running into is they’re finding their resources spread across multiple clouds with no way to consistently manage networking and security policy, explained Vince Hwang, senior director of dynamic cloud security at Fortinet, in an interview with SDxCentral.

Fortinet isn't the first SD-WAN vendor to integrate with Azure vWAN. Cisco and VMware, arguably Fortinet’s largest competitors in the SD-WAN space, have offered vWAN integrations with their own services for well over a year.

However, Fortinet’s integration isn’t limited to SD-WAN. It also extends the company’s virtualized next-generation firewalls into vWAN, explained Hwang. “Most of the other vendors that work with Azure vWAN are purely SD-WAN only. ... With Fortinet, what you get is a converged security and next-generation firewall and SD-WAN in a single solution.”

This means customers can now apply the same networking and security policy used to protect branch and data center locations to the public cloud, he added.

SD-WAN alone works fine for branch-to-branch and branch-to-cloud communications, Hwang explained, “but when you start extending across multiple clouds, hybrid clouds, and private clouds, that problem gets complex.”

By building firewall functionality into its vWAN integration, Fortinet claims to address this challenge without compromising on security.

Fortinet’s SD-WAN and firewall capabilities are available now as a one-click deployment from the Azure Marketplace or vWAN interface.

Microsoft Azure marks Fortinet’s latest public-cloud integration.

The security vendor announced support for Amazon Web Services Transit Connect Gateway — Amazon's competitor to Azure vWAN — late last year. And this spring, Fortinet announced a series of new integrations beginning with Google Cloud's Network Connectivity Center (NCC).

The latter allows customers to automatically route traffic between branches or between cloud workloads over Google Cloud’s private backbone network.

“With the integration of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and Google Cloud’s Network Connectivity Center, we are offering customers the unique opportunity to secure the cloud on-ramp into the cloud, between clouds and within the cloud,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison said at the time of the announcement.

Fortinet also extended support for Megaport’s Virtual Edge platform earlier this year. Like Azure vWAN and Google Cloud’s NCC, Megaport’s network-as-a-service platform promises to simplify branch-to-cloud connectivity for Fortinet customers.