Fortinet is building a bridge between clouds with the launch of Secure SD-WAN for Multicloud. The service, announced today, aims to address performance, visibility, and cost challenges associated with multicloud deployments.

The managed security and SD-WAN vendor sees this as an important opportunity as enterprises increasingly adopt multicloud strategies, and serves to enhance its existing cloud on-ramps. According to a recent Flexera report, 93% of enterprises surveyed said they plan to deploy workloads to multiple clouds.

“For enterprises deploying applications and workloads across multiple clouds, the need to seamlessly manage connectivity and maintain security across the diverse infrastructure is higher than ever,” Fortinet CMO John Maddison said in a statement. “Fortinet enables enterprises to realize the true potential of SD-WAN by enabling it to be implemented anywhere.”

The company claims the current practice of connecting multiple clouds through a private data center, while effective, is far from ideal as it nullifies many of the advantages multicloud offers, adds complexity, can result in inconsistent network performance, and often leads to increased cost. Instead, Fortinet is using a virtualized version of its SD-WAN platform — which is available on all of the major public clouds — to create direct connections from one provider to another. And because traffic doesn't have to be backhauled to headquarters, Fortinet can employ technologies, such as dynamic path selection, to improve performance.

Despite relying on virtualization in its latest SD-WAN offering, Fortinet claims it can still offer 10 times the performance of competing systems.

Fortinet has traditionally stuck with on-premises hardware, which benefits from its custom silicon. The company's seventh-generation network processor can handle 40 Gb/s elephant flows. The company's virtualized offerings can't take advantage of these ASICs.

To get around this, Fortinet is using a virtualized version of its security processing unit that it claims can provide more than 20 Gb/s of IPsec performance.