It was a busy week in the SD-WAN space — especially when it came to security.

On Tuesday, security-inclined SD-WAN vendor Fortinet announced it was breaking into the Nordic market with a new partnership with Telenor Sweden. This makes it one of the first SD-WAN vendors to do so.

Telenor anticipates there are more than 3,000 companies in the region with at least 50 employees and three locations that are either in the process of or planning to upgrade their WANs in the near future.

According to Tomas Flodin, product owner of SD-WAN at Telenor, Fortinet's security made it an ideal choice to power the company's SD-WAN offerings. “We chose Fortinet because they enable us to consolidate NGFW [next generation firewall] 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,” he said in a statement.

Telenor's will leverage several of Fortinet's security capabilities including its management and analytics platforms, FortiGate firewall, and ability to deliver SD-WAN over 3G and 4G LTE connections.

Alongside Fortinet's market win, California-based SD-WAN vendor Barracuda Networks unveiled a slew of upgrades to its cloud-based firewall, which it claims will enhance SD-WAN management, optimize cloud connectivity, and automate protection across multi-cloud deployments.

The vendor said the upgrades were driven by customer demand for simple and scalable security.

Improvements in release 8 of the company's CloudGen Firewall include direct internet break-out optimization, a new WAN path dashboard, automated integration with Microsoft Azure vWAN, and the ability to automatically establish a VPN across multiple cloud providers.

Release 8 also claims significant performance gains including a 50% increase in VPN performance.

This week Citrix announced it would begin offering Palo Alto Networks' firewalls its SD-WAN customers.

Citrix customers can now automatically provision Palo Alto Networks’ firewall on Citrix’s 1100 appliance as a virtual network function (VNF) or automate connections to the security vendor's Prisma Access cloud-based firewalls.

Citrix has a long history of collaborations with Palo Alto Networks, which has previously supplied firewall protection for Citrix’s enterprise data center applications and handled policy enforcement across the company’s SD-WAN.

The SD-WAN vendors' announcements come as a string of reports from the likes of Avant, Gartner, IDG, and Aryaka have found that security continues to be one of the biggest concerns for enterprises as they begin to transition to SD-WAN.

Of those surveyed in Avant's latest SD-WAN report out this week, more than 74% expressed fear that a cyberattack would cost them their job, while fewer than half believed their companies were prepared to combat such an attack.

A Gartner report (sponsored by Fortinet) from late 2018 — which surveyed 203 respondents with 25 or more WAN locations — found that 72% listed security, above performance or cost, as their top concern when it comes to tier WAN.

And according to a recent IDG report (sponsored by Masergy), security was the top criteria in selecting SD-WAN services.