November 24, 2019: Fortinet® (NASDAQ: FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced that it has been chosen by Ooredoo Kuwait, a part of Ooredoo Group – a leading international communications company operating across the Middle East, North Africa and Southeast Asia – to deliver the region’s first secure SD-WAN managed service. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN will allow Ooredoo’s existing and new enterprise customers to achieve accelerated connectivity, transport mode independence, and increased application performance while benefiting from tightly knit SD-WAN and advanced security features. Ooredoo Kuwait itself is deploying Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN across its retail branches and will serve as a reference for customers wishing to follow suit.

“Ooredoo Kuwait’s broad managed security services rely on several Fortinet solutions, including the Fortinet Secure SD-WAN solution, which significantly reduces onboarding efforts and speeds time to market for the service,” said Abdulaziz AlBabtain, Chief Business Officer at Ooredoo Kuwait. “Our secure SD-WAN managed service is much more than just a new connectivity service for the enterprise WAN edge. It is paving the way for significant benefits for our customers and significant new revenue streams for Ooredoo Kuwait by leveraging our security operations center, clean pipe, secure WiFi, email security, end-point security and advance threat protection.”

As organizations increase the use of business-critical cloud-based applications and infrastructures, they are becoming more attuned to the benefits of extending these tools to remote locations through software-defined wide-area network (SD-WAN) architectures, a network segment now referred to as the WAN Edge. In fact, because the need to provide the services and applications being generated by digital transformation to the WAN Edge is accelerating so rapidly, the global SD-WAN market is projected to reach $4.5 billion and grow at over 40% CAGR by 2022.

“SD-WAN offers accelerated connectivity, cost savings, and increased performance for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications. However, the benefits of SD-WAN cannot be truly realized without security as an integral part of the solution,” said Joe Sarno, International Emerging Vice President at Fortinet. “Without an integrated security solution, organizations are forced to overlay security, creating significant overhead and leaving gaps in protection as security and management systems remain isolated. We’re pleased to work with Ooredoo Kuwait to deliver the region’s first secure SD-WAN managed service and continue our focus of delivering integrated SD-WAN and advanced security to enterprise customers around the world.”

The following Fortinet products underpin Ooredoo Kuwait’s Secure SD-WAN managed service:

FortiPortal provides turnkey, easy-to-deploy customer portals for self-service without having to worry about complex development or maintenance costs
FortiSandbox delivers real-time actionable intelligence through the automation of zero-day, advanced malware detection and response
FortiMail is a top-rated secure email gateway that stops volume-based and targeted cyber threats to help secure the dynamic enterprise attack surface, prevent the loss of sensitive data and help maintain compliance with regulations
A range of FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls deliver both advanced security and SD-WAN services
FortiManager delivers single-pane-of-glass management for both SD-WAN and security, end-to-end visibility, and multi-tenancy to support many enterprise customers at scale
FortiAnalyzer delivers centralized reporting, advance analytics and open-programmable interface to integrate with customers’ existing investments and solutions
FortiClient ensures that all fabric components – FortiGate, FortiAnalyzer, EMS, Managed AP, Managed Switches, Sandbox – have a unified view of endpoints in order to provide tracking & awareness, compliance enforcement and reporting

Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN solution interoperates as part of a comprehensive security architecture through the Fortinet Security Fabric, producing an integrated end-to-end security solution across the entire attack surface that leverages Security-Driven Networking.