Managed service providers (MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs) operate in a highly competitive environment. Attracting new customers and retaining existing ones require the ability to differentiate MSPs’ and MSSPs’ offerings from the competition. In a crowded industry, achieving this can be a challenge.
When trying to stand out from the competition, MSPs and MSSPs need to ensure that they can follow through on their commitments. Deploying an array of point solutions to add additional capabilities to the provider’s offerings quickly becomes unscalable if each solution must be individually deployed, configured, monitored, and managed.
MSPs and MSSPs can take an alternative approach by building their offerings upon a strong, integrated foundation. Secure software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) integrates networking and security functionality into a single appliance, reducing security sprawl. It also lays the groundwork for MSPs and MSSPs to offer additional value-added services with minimal added overhead.
As demand for enterprise-level SD-WAN increases, organizations are increasingly moving from acquiring and operating their own SD-WAN equipment to using managed SD-WAN services. Managed SD-WAN providers take on the CapEx burden of SD-WAN equipment, deploying SD-WAN on the customer premises, or delivering cloud-managed SD-WAN. Managed SD-WAN providers add value through expertise that enterprises struggle to retain in-house, through ongoing investment in the latest SD-WAN technologies for the benefit of their customers, and through detailed knowledge of how SD-WAN solutions integrate with other vendors, particularly cloud infrastructure providers.
Onboarding new customers and rolling out new customer sites is a significant expense for a managed service provider (MSP) and managed security service provider (MSSP). As MSPs and MSSPs acquire new customers and support growing businesses, they need solutions that can be easily deployed to new customer environments and integrated with the customer’s existing infrastructure.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN provides a foundation for an MSP or MSSP deploying services to a new customer location. An integrated next-generation firewall (NGFW) and intrusion prevention system (IPS) provide threat prevention and traffic inspection, even of secure sockets layer (SSL) or transport layer security (TLS) encrypted flows. Integration with Fortinet Secure SD-Branch enables centralized visibility and network management down to the switching layer.
Fortinet is a member of the industry’s largest cybersecurity ecosystem, with over 250 Security Fabric Ecosystem Partners. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN and other Fortinet solutions offer out-of-the-box integration with all of these vendor products in as little as a single click via the Fortinet Security Fabric. The Fortinet open security ecosystem includes:
Traditional WAN security solutions operate by layering security on top of networking in the form of a collection of standalone appliances. This approach to WAN security can impair visibility and create silos since the point products in an organization’s security deployment may not communicate with one another. This decreases a managed service provider’s (MSP) and managed security service provider’s (MSSP) ability to efficiently manage their customer networks and increases operational costs and overhead. Finally, the use of standalone point products locks an organization into the transportation media that they can support.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN integrates networking and security functionality into a single appliance, removing the need to deploy an array of point security products. This enables MSPs and MSSPs to offer consistent, enterprise-grade security across their customers’ WANs with a dramatically lower total cost of ownership (TCO).
Secure SD-WAN also enables MSPs and MSSPs to offer their customers transport independence with secure hybrid WAN. Hybrid WAN allows traffic to be routed over multiple transport modes, which enables them to reduce their dependence upon expensive multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) bandwidth.
Secure SD-WAN also offers secure direct-to-internet connectivity for cloud applications since traffic inspection now occurs at the network edge. As customers increasingly transition to the cloud, the ability to offer direct routing for cloud-bound traffic from anywhere within the client’s environment is a significant competitive advantage.
As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers out-of-the-box integration with a wide range of Fortinet and third-party vendor solutions. MSPs and MSSPs can offer managed Secure SD-WAN services as a foundation for a variety of other networking and security services for their customers, such as:
With Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, MSPs and MSSPs can offer features such as:
Organizations’ corporate WANs are increasingly expanding to include cloud-based Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) resources. The need to route traffic from branch locations through the headquarters network for security scanning and policy enforcement degrades network performance, increases latency, and creates congestion on the corporate WAN. Managed service providers (MSPs) and managed security service providers (MSSPs) who can advertise improved cloud connectivity have a clear competitive advantage.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enables secure, direct-to-internet connectivity for cloud-bound traffic, which is essential for customers increasingly transitioning to use of IaaS and SaaS offerings. The built-in FortiGate next-generation firewall (NGFW) provides Layer 3 to Layer 7 protection and high performance guaranteed by the industry’s first purpose-built SD-WAN application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) chip. As part of the Fortinet Security Fabric, FortiGate NGFWs offer single-pane-of-glass visibility and management for MSPs and MSSPs, increasing operational efficiency and simplifying management of customers’ WANs.
Service providers can also offer cloud native security protections that are integrated with the Fortinet Security Fabric. FortiCASB and FortiCWP enable automation of security and compliance management in cloud environments. FortiWeb, available as a virtual machine (VM), physical appliance, or SaaS offering, provides protection for a customer’s cloud-based web pages, payment portals, and application programming interfaces (APIs). FortiGate NGFWs, which are available in a cloud native IaaS form factor (among others), enable cloud native protection in any deployment environment.
As customers move to the cloud, MSPs and MSSPs must be able to offer cloud-focused security to support them, such as those provided by Fortinet solutions:
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MSPs and MSSPs require solutions that allow them to operate more efficiently. SD WAN Solutions should provide a rapid time to revenue by requiring minimal configuration and deployment time on provider or customer networks. They should also offer high margins and scale easily to larger customer bases.
MSPs and MSSPs seek solutions that allow them to offer value-added services to their customers. Deploying managed SD-WAN services to customer networks allows them to offer additional products such as managed SD-Branch and IoT security services. Secure SD-WAN can also favorably compete with pure SD-WAN solutions since they also offer integrated security and analytics functionality.
MSPs and MSSPs seek offerings that they can quickly deploy to their customers after purchase. This includes both current customers, where new functionality can be added or enabled in an existing deployment, and new customers that require onboarding and solution deployment before services can be provided.
MSPs and MSSPs have customers with widely differing needs. They require the capability to offer pay-as-you-grow models for their products and services, allowing them to scale their offerings and prices to a customer’s unique situation.
The Fortinet Security Fabric, with out-of-the-box integration with over 250 third-party vendor products, enables single-pane-of-glass visibility and configuration management and real-time threat-intelligence sharing across a service provider’s entire network environment. With Secure SD-WAN Solutions, this enables MSPs and MSSPs to manage their customers’ entire network infrastructure from a single pane of glass. This also allows MSPs and MSSPs to improve efficiency, decrease total cost of ownership (TCO), and reduce their clients’ cybersecurity risk. FortiGate next-generation firewalls (NGFWs) also support numerous administrative domains (ADOMs) and virtual domains (VDOMs), providing management flexibility and supporting role-based access control (RBAC).
Secure SD-WAN enables MSPs and MSSPs to centralize visibility and management of their customers’ entire WAN. The Fortinet Security Fabric takes this a step further by enabling out-of-the-box integration with over 250 third-party vendor products through 12 Fabric Connectors, over 135 third-party application programming interfaces (APIs), 9 Fabric DevOps scripts, over 130 Extended Security Fabric Ecosystem partnerships, and an open-API architecture.
This integration enables MSPs and MSSPs to automate threat prevention, detection, and response, minimizing the overhead associated with securing customer environments. Centralized security management also enables MSPs and MSSPs to efficiently establish and enforce policies that comply with security standards. This, in turn, facilitates the automatic generation of reports for customers that demonstrate compliance for regulators and provide important security insights for the C-suite and the board.
Fortinet Secure SD-WAN links a customer’s entire security architecture via the Fortinet Security Fabric. The Security Fabric orchestrates threat intelligence across and between each of the organization’s security elements in real time. FortiGuard Labs leverages artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities to pinpoint known and unknown threats and communicate actionable intelligence across the Security Fabric. Threat intelligence is enhanced through partnerships with over 30 threat-sharing organizations and integration with over 100 other vendor products. With the Fortinet Security Fabric, this threat intelligence is communicated to all SD-WAN appliances in a customer’s WAN, ensuring enterprise-wide threat detection and prevention.
FortiGate NGFWs, with corroborated performance testing by NSS Labs, offer the industry’s lowest latency, which is an important feature for MSPs’ and MSSPs’ customers. The highly efficient custom FortiGate application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC), as well as the world’s first SD-WAN ASIC, enables Fortinet to provide high-performance security at the WAN edge and throughout the network. Moreover, turning on advanced features such as secure sockets layer/transport layer security (SSL/TLS) encryption inspection does not impact network performance in speed or throughput, unlike competitive solutions.
This is crucial for MSPs and MSSPs, whose customers expect security to not impact network performance and who require solutions that minimize capital expenditures (CapEx) and operational expenditures (OpEx). Fortinet is named a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Network Firewalls and a Leader in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for WAN Edge Infrastructure. Fortinet has won 2019 MEF 3.0 Proof of Concept Awards for Security Assurance in SD-WAN and Cloud Service Implementation, and is the only vendor to have NSS Labs Recommended status for nine different security products.
With FortiManager, Fortinet solutions can be easily deployed and centrally managed, allowing MSPs and MSSPs to easily roll out security infrastructure to new customers. FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer also allow MSPs and MSSPs to integrate and automate their client’s security deployment via the Fortinet Security Fabric, enabling analytics and compliance reporting through FortiAnalyzer. This integration also allows MSPs and MSSPs to break down silos that isolate security operations center (SOC) and network operations center (NOC) operations, enabling improved global visibility and more efficient operations. By deploying Fortinet Secure SD-Branch, centralized visibility and management is expanded to cover everything from the internet to the switching infrastructure in customer locations, simplifying security monitoring and management for MSPs and MSSPs.
Fortinet devices are capable of touchless onboarding and provisioning with the ability to preconfigure deployment settings before sending devices to customer locations. Fortinet devices also allow a single key for supported devices on bulk orders and expose a JavaScript object notation/extensible markup language (JSON/XML) API for device customization. This enables automated or programmatic deployment of Fortinet devices, enabling MSPs and MSSPs to eliminate truck rolls and achieve faster onboarding of new customers.
Multiple pricing and product consumption options offer MSPs and MSSPs and their customers the flexibility needed to optimally secure their data, infrastructure, and applications. This enables MSPs and MSSPs to scope their customers’ SD-WAN deployment, and the value-added services that it supports, to meet their customers’ specific needs.
Fortinet solutions are designed to be multitenant from the ground up, enabling MSPs and MSSPs to isolate but still manage multiple customer networks from a single console. This enables MSPs and MSSPs to take advantage of cost savings by offering customers networking over shared, but isolated, SD-WAN infrastructure—increasing average revenue per user (ARPU) while improving operational efficiencies.
Fortinet offers a range of training opportunities to help MSPs and MSSPs better attract and serve customers and to differentiate their services and grow their business. Opportunities include seller training, technical training, and advanced training. This helps MSPs and MSSPs to learn how to optimize their SD-WAN deployment and efficiently deploy value-added services to their customers.
The Fortinet Joint Solution Marketing Model provides MSPs and MSSPs with numerous opportunities to improve and grow their business. These include a partner-focused marketing team, support for developing messaging, blogs, case studies, and selective support for partner campaigns. This helps MSPs and MSSPS to maximize the impact of their marketing regarding SD-WAN offerings and the additional value-added services that it enables.
