Orange Business Services teams up with Fortinet on cloud-based SASE service

Orange Business Services and Fortinet are launching a new managed SASE (secure access service edge) service within Orange's Telco Cloud Platform. The companies have previously partnered to provide an SD-WAN service, which will also be part of the SASE service.

Franck Morales, VP of marketing and BU connectivity at Orange Business Services, said the SASE service will be cloud-based and can be used in conjunction with Orange's network connectivity services such as MPLS or SD-WAN.

The global SD-WAN market grew by 35% in 2021 with revenue of over $2 billion, according to a recent Dell'Oro Group report. Among the top five vendors, Cisco led the market in 2021, with Fortinet coming in second. VMware, Versa and HPE were next in line among the top five vendors.

SASE is the convergence of networking and security services, and the combination of SD-WAN and network security technologies is a popular approach for vendors to differentiate their SD-WAN services, said Dell'Oro.

"Demand for SD-WAN solutions picked up in 2021 as enterprises continued to optimize their branch network architectures for the cloud services and workloads they are implementing," said Shin Umeda, VP for Dell'Oro Group, in a statement. "The pandemic created pent-up demand that boosted the market growth in 2021, but it also drove companies to evaluate and adopt SD-WAN for a more distributed work force."

Fortinet is Orange's first vendor partner in the SASE space, but Morales said he expects the service provider to add more managed SASE options in the future. In addition, he said SASE addresses enterprise customers' security and connectivity needs for edge computing applications.

"All this convergence is there to support business and IT teams in achieving delivery to their business lines, but it becomes quite complex to globally manage all these things," said Morales. "So, we are developing a lot in terms of AIOps and machine learning, and the fact that everything is in our Telco Cloud Platform will facilitate a global approach to that."

John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO for Fortinet, said that the SASE service provides security features such as secure web gateway, malware scanning, CASB, URL filtering, firewall-as-a-service and more. Zero trust network access capabilities will be added in future updates to the service, he said.

"Because you've got more edges now, the traditional way of building networks and layering on security is not working. So you need this converged solution," said Maddison.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading