Fortinet unveiled a new SD-WAN appliance aimed at Fortune 1000 companies’ branch deployments. The FortiGate 80F is the company's latest CPE appliance and slots in above Fortinet's home-office- and small-branch-focused FortiGate 40F and 60F appliances announced earlier this year.

"With the increase in work from home and adoption of multi-cloud, a truly effective SD-WAN solution must be able to be implemented anywhere," said Fortinet CMO John Maddison in a statement.

According to Fortinet, Fortune 1000 companies face challenging deployments often constrained by congestion, latency, and packet loss. The Fortigate 80F attempts to rectify these challenges by providing customers with a small-form-factor, all-in-one branch appliance.

"FortiGate 80F supports complex Fortune 1000 deployments with the industries best performance, automated overlay at scale, and advanced networking capabilities to achieve the highest possible quality of experience," the company claims.

Alongside the standard features like routing, next-generation firewall, and SD-WAN capabilities, the 80F also includes several creature comforts like integrated WiFi and a power-over-Ethernet switch. The latter of which enables the appliance to power additional networking gear like wireless access points, further extending the hardware's reach.

According to Fortinet, these features allow the company to address everything from compact to large-scale branch deployments.

Like the FortiGate 40F and 60F, Fortinet's new appliance is powered by the same fourth-generation security processor and SD-WAN ASIC. This enables the 80F to support 1.5 million concurrent sessions, 10 Gb/s of firewall throughput, and 6.5 Gb/s of throughput over IPsec tunnels.

The news comes just weeks after the security vendor acquired secure access service edge (SASE) start-up Opaq for an undisclosed sum. The move signaled Fortinet's entrance into the increasingly competitive SASE market.

Coined by Gartner, SASE combines elements of SD-WAN and managed security into a single cloud-managed platform.

Much of the Opaq acquisition was centered on the company's cloud-based zero-trust network access platform. While Fortinet already offered zero trust technology, it was appliance based.

However, a shift to SASE is unlikely to spell the end of Fortinet's appliance-heavy portfolio. As Gartner analyst Neil MacDonald pointed out in a recent interview with SDxCentral, SASE vendors are still going to need SD-WAN appliances at the branch.

As such, the 80F is unlikely to be the last hardware we see from Fortinet.