Executive Summary
Organizations with global offices delivering hypeconnectivity between workloads and users face more challenges than ever due to market economics, competitor dynamics, and consumer behaviors. Competitors are changing strategies and product iterations faster than ever to match consumer expectations. Those expectations might include 24/7 great user experience, secure connectivity, and high performance.
Fortinet can work with AWS Cloud WAN to deliver the secure connectivity across your global private networks by providing complete end to end security through each part within the transit network. Fortinet's Security Fabric can integrate with AWS Cloud WAN to help customers onboard their journey to the cloud or provide smart routing through its SD-WAN capabilities to help customers have more flexibility in their design architecture. Ultimately, the integration between Fortinet and AWS Cloud WAN help reduce complexity in your network while still securing your last mile traffic across your global infrastructure.
What is the value in the new AWS Cloud WAN service?
AWS Cloud WAN is a managed WAN service that enable organizations to build, manage, and monitor your global connections across on-premises and cloud environments. What this means is that network operators have a central place to create, manage, and continuously monitor WAN connections between their datacenters, cloud networks, and branch offices. In the past, network teams would have had to build out their own infrastructure by relying on multiple different products and services from different vendors and providers. In AWS pre-Cloud WAN, customers would need to use network services like 3rd party VPN appliances for site-to-site VPN, Direct Connect for private connectivity, Transit Gateway for intra-cloud connectivity individually and inefficiently. With AWS Cloud WAN, organizations are using a single operational interface to connect to AWS backbone infrastructure directly and route their WAN traffic across locations or environments.
How can I use Fortinet’s Security Fabric and AWS Cloud WAN to secure my global connectivity?
Fortinet’s Security Fabric enhances global connectivity by securing the last mile of connectivity such that users and workloads and securely, effectively, and efficiently communicate with one another. Some of the solutions that can be used include:
- Award-winning threat intelligence, FortiGuard
- Industry-leading secure networking solution, FortiGate with native ZTNA and SD-WAN controls
Of course, Fortinet’s Security Fabric integrates with many other solutions in the portfolio to enhance better visibility and control.
While AWS Cloud WAN can deliver basic security at the macro segmentation level where you can divide networks up by departments, locations, or use cases, they fail to help organizations with that last mile security.
For example, communications between 2 different HQ locations can use AWS Cloud WAN service to transport traffic through AWS infrastructure. While organizations can rely on AWS to secure their backbone infrastructure, that still leaves the last mile unsecured. Implementing FortiGate's award winning NGFW technology provides a unified platform to secure your networks across hybrid and multi-cloud environments
The benefits to this includes:
- Single vendor to secure networks across global WAN infrastructure
- Lowered operational cost
- Intelligent and secure routing for resilient application delivery
Adding onto the previous diagram shown above, Fortinet can help with on-ramping organizations to cloud environment while still delivering a resilient and secure architecture.
For customers using SD-WAN, they can rely on leading networking technologies from FortiGate to secure their application delivery. Fortinet can help optimize traffic by path selection, bandwidth aggregation, and more to help ensure network resiliency.
For example, let's say Global HQ in California wanted more flexibility in designing their WAN to ensure that there is more redundancy in their WAN layout or to communicate with a branch office directly via VPN without going through AWS Cloud WAN service, they can utilize FortiGate Secure SD-WAN. The Global HQ in California can have private WAN connection via Direct Connect to AWS Cloud WAN service to have traffic travel to India while VPN services to be used to connect to a branch office in Seattle. Security team can enforce policies to ensure all traffic from global HQ is securely delivered to the branch office and vice versa while preventing traffic from HQ in India from reaching Seattle. Additionally, branch office can also be attached to AWS Cloud WAN for link redundancy and help the branch office reach other locations (like cloud networks) while still remaining segmented for more security.
To summarize, Fortinet's Security Fabric together with AWS Cloud WAN provide a resilient and simplified architecture to secure application delivery. Network traffic can travel through AWS backbone infrastructure and secured with Fortinet.
