Oman-based cloud and managed service provider Oman Data Park selected Fortinet’s SD-WAN service to boost its managed security services portfolio. This is the first managed SD-WAN that the service provider has offered as part of its portfolio of managed enterprise services.

This addition extends Oman Data Park and Fortinet's 7-year partnership in which Oman has sold Fortinet’s cloud and on-premises security to its enterprise customers. The service provider also leverages Fortinet’s next-generation firewall (NGFW) features, including its intrusion prevention system (IPS), web-filtering, anti-malware, and cloud sandbox.

The service provider chose Fortinet as its first SD-WAN primarily due to the services combined security and SD-WAN functionality, according to Nirav Shah, the senior director of network security products at Fortinet. “It was a simple add-on to their existing Fortinet infrastructure making it easy for Oman to enable the SD-WAN feature for many of their existing customers who are using Fortinet’s NGFW CPEs.”

By offering Fortinet SD-WAN as a managed service, Oman Data Park’s customers can tap a single service that provides automatic WAN path control, security, and multiple-broadband support. In addition, customers can leverage its application-aware functionality to security applications hosted on their Oman Data Park cloud. This includes email and web application security as well as advanced threat protection.

Fortinet debuted its SD-WAN in July 2018. The technology consolidates several products at the branch into a single device. This includes routing, WAN optimization, SD-WAN, and security components. The combined appliance can run on both its firewall hardware or in a virtual machine (VM).

According to Shah, since launching, Fortinet has seen “a lot of momentum” surrounding the product. This includes a number of managed security service providers adding its Secure SD-WAN services to their offerings. “Given that SD-WAN is a feature of our FortiGate Firewalls, we have observed many of these MSSPs are also offering ‘Secure SD-WAN’ services to their customers,” he said.