As organizations continue to expand the number of remote offices connected to the corporate network, bandwidth requirements increase and more applications move to the cloud, traditional MPLS connections are not as effective. They are costly for distributed organizations that continue to grow and can inhibit visibility, security, and performance at these new locations.

With branch offices spread across city, state, and even country borders, financial services organizations are all too familiar with the challenge of providing robust, secure, and cost-effective connectivity to their remote locations.

SD-WAN to Support Evolving Business Requirements

One financial services organization in particular found that the single MPLS and Internet link in place at each branch location was severely hindering the voice and video experience of their business-critical applications. A connectivity issue like this is especially problematic in the financial services industry as it can negatively impact both employee collaboration and customer interactions.

With over 500 employees and distributed infrastructure across the Middle East and Africa, all of which require secure access to the corporate network, this organization began the search for an SD-WAN solution that would provide application steering with SLA and effortlessly support multiple WAN connections from a number of remote offices.

While this company knew that a solution supporting those business requirements was a worthwhile investment in itself, they also wanted a feature-rich SD-WAN solution that could support their changing business needs well into the future.

Luckily, Fortinet was able to provide just that.

Fortinet Secure SD-WAN Functionality

By leveraging a Security-Driven Networking approach to SD-WAN, which combines networking and security in a single appliance, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides organizations with high-speed application performance and built-in next-generation firewall functionality. This scalable, easy-to-manage solution is especially appealing to growing financial services organizations that need to enable network traffic to securely travel over multiple connections between branches and headquarters.

Choosing Fortinet Secure SD-WAN

After some preliminary conversations, this organization understood the unique values of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN as a robust solution that provides far more than just SD-WAN and were pleased to see that Fortinet was able to accomplish all 10 objectives they had set for the SD-WAN solution they would like to adopt.

With a solution that provided Secure SD-WAN, WAN optimization, traffic shaping, automation, Next-Generation Firewall, and more, this company felt confident that Fortinet would support multiple use cases, from their current business needs to any future requirements. The key benefits this company experienced are as follows:

• Centralized Management and Reporting:Single pane of glass management with zero-touch deployment allows organizations to easily deploy Fortinet Secure SD-WAN at remote branch locations, reducing the need for additional IT staff and improving visibility and control across the entire network infrastructure.
• Intelligent Application Steering:Our Secure SD-WAN solution intelligently identifies applications to determine the path it should take in order to to provide enhanced application experience -even during brown out or black out conditions.
• Integrated Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) Functionality:  Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides integrated NGFW functionality, including deep SSL inspection capabilities, without compromising on performance, which was a critical capability for this customer.
• Future Proofing with SD-Branch:During the deployment of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, this customer began looking to extend the solution to converge LAN and WAN operations, consolidating complete branch operations with Fortinet Secure SD-Branch.

Take a security-driven approach to networking to improve user experience and simplify operations at the WAN edge with Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN solution.

Read more about how FortiGate Secure SD-WAN helped Fortinet optimize network performance in this case study. 

Read these customer case studies to see how De Heus and Burger King Brazil implemented Fortinet's Secure SD-WAN to alleviate network complexity, increase bandwidth, and reduce security costs.