Network security has evolved into the third era of securing data, and Fortinet continues to lead the way with its differentiating secure access service edge (SASE) solutions, boasted Fortinet co-founder, chairman and CEO Ken Xie in his keynote at Fortinet Accelerate 2024 event.

Xie recalled the company's early focus on firewalls with application control, intrusion prevention and antivirus functions, leading to the development of next-generation firewall (NGFX) and unified threat management (UTM) solutions.

“But now in the next few years, data also becomes more important. And the network security no longer just protects enterprise parameters anymore. You need to protect the whole infrastructure,” he said. “So that's how the SASE market started taking off.”

Fortinet's over five years of investment in the SASE market has positioned the company as a front-runner in the integration of SD-WAN and various SASE functions into FortiOS, its proprietary operating system, Xie said.

“We're not only the leader in the first-generation network security and the second generation,” he said. “We also believe in the next few years, Fortinet also will be the No.1 player, will be the leader in the SASE space.”

“The reason we assure you is because we build this differently than all other SASE players, we have a long-term investment and thinking about SASE and what's the best way to address this new SASE market,” Xie said.

In the keynote speech, Xie highlighted several key differentiators that set Fortinet apart in the SASE market. These differentiators include the following:

• Unified SASE functions: Fortinet integrates all SASE functions into a single operating system, FortiOS, streamlining deployment and enhancing security coherence across different functions, including SD-WAN, secure web gateway (SWG), encryption and decryption, cloud access security broker (cloud access security broker (CASB)), data loss prevention (DLP) and zero-trust network access (ZTNA).
• ASIC acceleration: Fortinet uses its custom ASIC for SASE processing acceleration and performance boost, addressing performance, cost and power consumption issues more effectively than competitors, for both cloud and on-premise solutions, Xie claims.
• Hybrid deployment flexibility: Unlike other SASE providers that offer cloud-only solutions, Fortinet supports both cloud-based and on-premises deployments, allowing for more flexible and secure data traffic management tailored to different work environments, such as remote work or office settings.
• Local processing capabilities: Xie emphasized the importance of processing SASE functions locally through its FortiSASE hardware components. This approach reduces the security risks associated with forwarding sensitive and private traffic to cloud-based points of presence (PoPs).
• Global PoP infrastructure: Xie boasted Fortinet now has nearly 200 globally distributed PoPs, with about a third owned by the company, offering cost advantages and enhanced control over cloud-based traffic processing.

“Because SASE needs so much function, so much power, none of the other players are able to process in a general purpose CPU, a single OS. We are the only one who can do that. We are also the only one who can use ASIC as an accelerator. So that gave us a huge advantage to using Fortient SASE compared to our other competitor,” Xie said.

At the event, Xie showcased Fortinet’s “single pyramid shape, layered vision” with the mission of “fortifying your network” on the top.

“When we started the company 24 years ago, you will need to fortify your network in cyberspace to protect your data, your assets, your people there. So that's where that name, Fortinet comes from. Fortinet is worrying about fortifying your network. And that's also make it easy to name another product,” he said.

Then the layer below the mission is converging or replacing networking with network security, which converges networking to secure networking to manage content, applications, users, devices, data and location. Xie expects the secure networking market will grow faster and take over the networking market.

The third layer is Fortinet’s FortiOS operating system and FortiASIC chips to improve performance, lower costs and reduce energy consumption. The last layer is Fortinet’s services and products for firewall; OT, IoT and edge security; segmentation and ZTNA, SASE and artificial intelligence (AI) driven SecOps.