Unified SASE Solutions: Addressing The Security Needs Of Today’s Businesses

As businesses navigate digital transformation, the need for a unified SASE solution is clear. With the rise of remote work, organizations require secure, reliable access to data and applications.

In an exclusive interview with CRNtv host Sydney Neely, Alexandra Mehat, director of product marketing at Fortinet, explains how their innovative Unified SASE solution addresses these needs.

What Is Fortinet’s Unified SASE Solution All About?

Sydney: Could you start by explaining what Fortinet’s Unified SASE solution is and what unique features it offers compared to other SASE solutions in the market?

Alexandra: Unified SASE, which we just released, is one of the most unified, flexible and intelligent solutions in the market. It’s unified because it's a truly integrated SASE solution that fully integrates our Secure SD-WAN solution with our cloud-delivered SSE solution, called FortiSASE.

FortiSASE is flexible because you can deploy it in any location, whether it’s on premise, full cloud or everything in between. It can also be deployed in micro branches, where Fortinet has the unique capability of securing all the devices behind our own access points, fully protected by our SASE solution.

FortiSASE is also intelligent because, for years now, our SASE has been powered by AI driven services. It's fully AI-powered services in the background are FortiGuard services, which power our SASE solution. These services gather Intel from our 750,000-plus customers around the world, allowing us to incorporate this intelligence into all our solutions, including SASE.

Partner Perks – How Partners Benefit

Sydney: Let’s dive into partner perks. How does Fortinet’s SASE specifically benefit partners and help them deliver better services to their clients?

Alexandra: Our FortiSASE is simple—it’s fully integrated and fully converged. This allows partners to go to their customers and say, “Hey, we have a really simple solution for you.”

For partners, you can start with a Fortinet product, and then it becomes a full platform. Customers already know and love the technology, which makes it easier to add more components.

You can start with the firewall being the same thing as SD-WAN at Fortinet, and then add our FortiSASE component to improve all the security of users— from on-premise, to the office, to remote workers. Many customers out there still have VPN, they want to replace it, and SASE is one of the best solutions out there.

Real-World Impact

Sydney: Can you share some real-world examples of how Fortinet’s SASE has been implemented and the impact it’s had on customers’ business?

Alexandra: We had a global customer in the mining industry that had four different solutions for their firewall, SD-WAN, remote worker security SSE and VPN. They were really struggling with the integration. They decided to switch entirely to Fortinet’s Unified SASE solution, which provided one management, one system for everything. They told us they reduced the cost by 68 percent thanks to that.

Getting Started With FortiSASE

Sydney: For partners who are watching and interested, what are the first steps they should take to get started with Fortinet’s SASE and are there training programs available to help get them up to speed?

Alexandra: if they're an existing Fortinet partner— which I hope they are— they should contact their channel account manager or email SASEChannel@Fortinet.com. They should also check the SASE hub in their partner portal. We offer a lot of perks and resources to help them train, including what we call the Fast Track program which will help them get trained on SASE.

We also have a special SKU available at a very low price, allowing them to test SASE as a demo or use it in their lab to demo to customers. We have a lot of resources for our great partners to help them out, including a great partner program and portal. Our channel account managers are always ready to help get them prepared to sell SASE.

For more information on Fortinet’s Unified SASE solution, visit fortinet.com/unifiedsase.