Managed service provider Masergy this week announced a new remote work offering built on Fortinet's SD-WAN and emerging secure access service edge (SASE) platforms.

The service provider sees many enterprises forced to support a remote workforce due to the pandemic, transitioning to this model on a permanent basis.

"As many initially temporary work-from-home arrangements are made permanent, the shift to the cloud is broadening and accelerating. Enterprises need scalable, distributed access from anywhere, to anywhere, with great performance," said John Burke, principal research analyst at Nemertes Research, in a report cited by Masergy.

Masergy's SD-WAN Secure Home and SD-WAN On the GO offerings are designed to address these needs. The first of these offerings is a lightweight SD-WAN appliance supplied by Fortinet, aimed at executives and "power users."

The appliance enables quality of service to be applied to the home network, allowing certain traffic, like voice-over-IP, to be prioritized, explained Fortinet CMO John Maddison, in an earlier interview with SDxCentral. In addition to supporting SD-WAN, the appliance can be configured with multiple internet links for redundancy and features a next-generation firewall powered by Fortinet's custom ASICs.

SD-WAN On the GO embodies Masergy's upcoming SASE offering – also built on Fortinet technology – slated for launch in November. The multi-platform software client uses IPsec tunnels and endpoint protection to securely connect users to the corporate network.

Both products can be managed through Masergy's client portal and can be bundled with a variety of unified communications-as-a-service (uCaaS).

Fortinet gets SASE

Fortinet has traditionally been a hardware-centric security vendor, relying heavily on its ASICs to accelerate software workloads like SD-WAN. However, with the acquisition of Opaq in July, the company officially embraced Gartner's SASE architecture.

Fortinet's approach to SASE differs slightly from Gartner's in that the company sees hardware security as an asset, and not something that should be relegated solely to the cloud.

"I think the concept of convergence is completely spot on; the concept of the platform is spot on,” said Maddison 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 aims to use its ASICs to accelerate its software not just at the edge but in the cloud as well. The company 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,” Maddison said. “This allows us to run at very high speeds, and we can put huge amounts of capacity at these peering points.”