Fortinet recently acquired secure access service edge (SASE) startup Opaq to deliver security wherever the customer needs it, CMO John Maddison said in an interview with SDxCentral.

The deal also signaled Fortinet's adoption of the Gartner-coined architecture, which celebrates its first birthday this month. SASE ties together elements of SD-WAN, security, and edge compute into a single cloud-delivered package.

However, the pivot to what is by and large a cloud-based security stack drew some concern from financial analysts following the Opaq acquisition in July. During the company's second quarter of 2020 earnings call, analysts questioned how a shift to cloud-based security might affect the company's bread and butter firewall business.

This question of cloud-based security is a key area where Fortinet breaks with Gartner's definition and is blazing its own trail.

"I don't know how sometimes they come up with these things. I think the concept of convergence is completely spot on; the concept of the platform is spot on," Maddison said in credit to Gartner's SASE vision. "The only areas where I thought Gartner was a bit strange was Gartner said 'oh, this can only happen in the cloud.'"

Fortinet takes issue with this idea, likely because the company has built its business around ASICs capable of running networking and security functions at line speeds.

"I think what they mean by that is not many people can provide that converged solution on hardware," Maddison said. "So most vendors have gone to a cloud solution because you can just throw as much compute as you want at it and it will work."

Fortinet isn't outright dismissing cloud-based security, which is a core tenant of Gartner's SASE definition. In fact, Fortinet bought Opaq to bolster its cloud-delivered security capabilities. But, the company is differentiating itself from rival SASE vendors by putting security at every point of the network: in the SD-WAN appliance, at the service edge, and in the cloud.

"Where we disagree a bit is you should be able to apply that converged solution anywhere in the network in any form factor," Maddison said.

"Sometimes it makes sense to do [security] in the cloud because you want to be close to the application. You don't so much care about the cost, you want to just make sure it's flexible," he said. "Sometimes it makes sense to do it in an appliance because it's at a WAN edge and you want to protect the LAN as well."

It is no secret much of Fortinet's success is born from its use of custom ASICs to accelerate security and networking workloads.

The company's seventh-generation network processor, announced in February, is capable of simultaneously juggling millions of connections while securing large streams of data associated with 5G, IoT, health care, and gaming. "One of our appliances works 100-times faster than a CPU," said Maddison.

So, it should come as no surprise ASICs will play an important role in Fortinet's SASE offering. As the vendor builds out its service edge over the next year, Maddison said Fortinet's appliances, running its custom silicon, will be at the heart of its points of presence (PoPs).

Fortinet began installing its appliances in Equinix facilities back in February, months before adopting the SASE sigil.

"Now we can take advantage of our appliances in those peering data centers," he said. "This allows us to run at very high speeds, and we can put huge amounts of capacity at these peering points."

This runs counter to how SASE vendors run their service in public clouds, he said. "If you look at some of these SASE services, they're sitting in public clouds; they're rate limited; they're using virtual machines. There are all sorts of limitations that you don't know about until you roll out the service," Maddison added.

Running a SASE stack in the public cloud isn't economical, he claims. "Yes, it's much easier to just wrap it up inside the cloud... you get the coverage and off you go," he said, but it's much more expensive and vendors are now at the whim of the cloud provider.

While Fortinet claims to have the most complete SASE stack of any vendor to date, the company still has a ways to go on its service edge.

With the acquisition of Opaq, Fortinet inherited a network of PoPs covering the U.S. market. "We're targeting, by the end of the year, to have global coverage in Europe and [the Asia-Pacific region]," Maddison said. "We'll build it where we think it's appropriate for our customers. We'll build it very large scale, and we'll build it very high performance."