They claim their joint offer will disrupt secure access service edge (SASE) market and more
Orange Business Services and security specialist Fortinent have collaborated to integrate Fortinet’s secure network tech into Orange’s telco cloud infrastructure.
They worked together for a year to achieve this and say the “work from anywhere” ethos ushered in by the pandemic and adoption of cloud connectivity demanded a change in how network infrastructure is constructed and secured, with in-built integration and automation.
The idea is to reinforce network convergence and security, and optimise the network’s performance “regardless of the user’s location”.
Orange and Fortinet had already partnered to offer customers Flexible SD-WAN based on Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, which, they claim, “provides the foundation for cloud-native transformations at scale for improved business agility and resilience” and on-demand to boot.
Managed by someone else
Franck Morales, VP Marketing, BU Connectivity at Orange Business Services said in an interview with Mobile Europe, “This solution means that the compatibility between [customers] WAN solution – their WAN service and WAN MPLS – and also on the cloud connectivity side will be assured by Orange – guaranteed by SLA from the user to the cloud – and so will save the customer resources in making that effort.”
He also said, “Our telco cloud platform allows us to immediately benefit from service evolution and improvements on the fly as they become available [from] our partners, Fortinet in this case… so this is innovation delivery of a solution that provides value for customers with three main differentiators compared to what we have seen today.”
John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO, Fortinet, added, “Instead of having a network then putting a security layering on top, you build a network with security-driven networking technology.”
He continued, “Customers want [security] to be managed, they want it to be hosted by somebody else…it’s not just a technology…as the digital experience accelerates, edges are forming in the network. So one edge is [for] SD-WAN, the cloud edge will be SASE. There’s a 5G edge and there’s a LAN edge
“We can put our technology in all of those places, but our customers much prefer that we partner and [Orange Business Services] has been a very strong partners over the years: the combination of our technology and their ability to run high availability, high speed networks, makes it a perfect fit to put this technology there because you can’t have one without the other. It’s not just technology – it’s the management and the hosting and everything else.”
Key emerging tech
Gary Barton, Principal Analyst for Enterprise Technology and Services, GlobalData, said in a written statement, “SASE is one of the key emerging technology areas in the network services landscapes as it delivers…security integration that is mission-critical for the enterprises GlobalData has spoken to.
“Orange’s partnership with Fortinet is a big step towards realizing the ultimate ambitions of the SASE concept as it is cloud/network-edge-first in its architecture and design principles. Orange’s global cloud/SaaS interconnects and proven managed services capabilities also add differentiation to its proposition.”