11:11 Systems launched a managed SD-WAN and firewall powered by Fortinet to meet a growing demand for the consolidation of managed network and security tools.

The managed product, dubbed 11:11 Connectivity Solutions, allows enterprises to secure client locations from a single portal, ease management, and keep costs down by only having one appliance, explained Anthony Lobretto, SVP of Connectivity Services at 11:11 Systems.

For a managed SD-WAN, the service provider acts as a single point of contact for the complete solution, including the SD-WAN appliance, software license, WAN services, and managed services. Frost & Sullivan noted in its latest "Managed SD-WAN Services Radar" the “growing mix of providers and technologies, and the complexities of managing them all” has pushed enterprises to the managed services space for SD-WAN.

Lobretto said 11:11 Systems’ customers are finding it difficult to figure out last-mile cloud connectivity for local edges. “What we wanted to do is consolidate appliances at the edge. We didn't want our clients to have to have two appliances, one being an SD-WAN appliance and one being a next-generation firewall,” he told SDxCentral.

The vendor's platform addresses this by “putting intelligent appliances at the edge, bundling it with circuits or connectivity, and managing that in a way that the devices can look at upstream attributes and figure out the best path to get to the cloud application," Lobretto explained.

The provider is seeing interest from the public sector, including municipalities that need to connect to cloud environments for services like E911. Lobretto said managed SD-WAN services have also gained traction with health care customers, “especially on the pharmacy side,” where there are many different locations that need to be reliably connected to cloud apps.

“Uptime is very important. And then there's also just the management of the overall SD-WAN policies,” Lobretto noted. “So it's sitting down with the customer, understanding their needs, understanding their application, building the SD-WAN policies that match, and then managing that on an ongoing basis.”

Frost & Sullivan found that most providers start their SDN journey with SD-WAN and then continue to offer more services including secure access secure edge (SASE), which combines network services and security services such as firewalls, intrusion detection and prevention, and security gateways at hubs and endpoints.

SASE security, according to Gartner, includes cloud access security broker (CASB), firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and secure web gateway (SWG).

Frost & Sullivan noted most SD-WAN providers are also offering or considering “value-added security services” such as endpoint detection and response (EDR), managed detection and response (MDR), and overall extended detection and response (XDR) efforts.

The 11:11 Systems managed service provides customers with a “turnkey firewall security solution,” and Lobretto pointed out the provider also supports EDR that integrates with Fortinet’s SD-WAN appliances.

“All of our network services have security in mind and our security capabilities. We have a 24/7 security operation center that we can also add on to our SD-WAN service,” he noted. “So not only are you getting the SD-WAN functionality, but you have somebody looking at the devices and your internal devices from a SOC perspective, which we think there's real value there.”

11:11 Systems is “working on and will also be deploying a SASE-type deployment in the near future,” Libretto said.