ORLANDO, Florida – Fortinet deepened its ties into Microsoft’s Azure platform to provide a consistent operational security model for customers running applications on Azure. This runs on top of the embedded Azure infrastructure security that isolates tenants running in the cloud.

The deepening of those ties starts with Fortinet’s FortiGate Secure SD-WAN now being integrated with Azure Virtual WAN (vWAN). This integration automates the creation and tear down of branches that are connected to the Azure vWAN and provides a centralized management of connected clouds across those branches and regions.

FortiGate is the firm’s next-generation firewall appliance, which is what it offers its SD-WAN features through. Fortinet began selling SD-WAN directly to its customers (through this appliance) last year.

A recent IHS Markit report showed that Fortinet had displaced rival Silver Peak in the No. 4 spot in terms of SD-WAN appliance and software revenues. VMware, Cisco, and Aryaka lead the market.

The Azure integration also spreads top Fortinet’s FortiCWP (cloud workload protection), which the company launched in late September. The integration uses Fortinet’s FortiGuard-based threat intelligence to provide Azure customers with increased visibility into their cloud workloads activity and configurations. It can also support deeper analysis of data stored in Microsoft Azure Blob, which is the cloud provider's object storage platform.

FortiCWP can work across clouds and uses those cloud provider APIs to provide a view across workloads in any cloud region.

Fortinet is also adding its FortiWeb Cloud WAF-as-a-service product to the Microsoft Azure Marketplace. Customers can now use that outlet to activate and automatically provision the cloud-based web application firewall product. The as-a-service model also lowers the security skills needed to manage the platform.

Lior Cohen, senior director of cloud security products at Fortinet, explained in an email to SDxCentral that the new product “leverages public cloud infrastructure to deliver the same application and API protection as our physical and virtual appliances but without the requirement to maintain and manage infrastructure.” Cohen added that the company also included machine learning (ML) capabilities that provide actionable visibility to improve threat detection and reduce false positives.

The Azure integration follows up on a similar move with Amazon Web Services (AWS) in June.

It also follows up on a handful of similar WAF-as-a-service announcements tied into Azure that have been announced over the past week. Cohen said that the Fortinet offer is unique in that it’s the only cloud-native WAF SaaS platform that use ML to integrate with global content delivery network (CDN) capabilities. And it’s a multitenant product that does not require Fortinet to spin up dedicated resources for each customer, “which gives us the elasticity we need to scale as customers’ application traffic grows without making customers pay for slack capacity that they may not use.”

The as-a-service push should take advantage of an expected increase in enterprise interest in cloud-based platforms. A recent Gartner report predicts that usage of broader cloud web application security platforms that combine API management gateways, WAF, and bot management features to protect public-facing web APIs will increase from 5% this year to 20% by 2024.

The FortiWeb Cloud WAF platform continues to be offered as a hardware device, software-as-a-service, and virtual appliance through the major cloud providers. The company last year added ML capabilities to the platform for behavioral-based threat detection in web applications.

Fortinet last week launched its FortiGate 60F firewall that it claims offers security compute rates of 10 Gb/s, or 15-times better than the industry average. Nirav Shah, senior director of products and solutions at Fortinet, told SDxCentral that this allows customers to get around the bandwidth and latency challenges that hamper many SD-WAN deployments without compromising on security.