CYBERSECURITY

What Differentiates Fortinet Unified SASE from Other SASE Solutions?

As organizations accelerate cloud adoption and support permanent hybrid work, many are turning to secure access service edge (SASE) to unify their network and security architecture. But despite a crowded field of vendors, very few deliver on the full promise of convergence.

That’s because most SASE offerings are fragmented. Vendors piece together loosely connected components—often through acquisition—and call it a platform. The result is a complex, brittle stack with hidden integration costs, performance trade-offs, and inconsistent security enforcement.

Fortinet Unified SASE is fundamentally different. It combines FortiSASE, our cloud-delivered security service, with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, all built on a common operating system (FortiOS), a shared management framework, and real-time threat intelligence from the Fortinet Security Fabric. This design offers a fully unified, flexible, and intelligent approach to SASE that is unmatched in performance, scalability, and security:

• Unified through one agent, one console, one OS, and fully integrated threat intelligence
• Flexible across deployment models, with support for thin edge devices, agent and agentless access, hybrid and multi-cloud networks, and sovereign cloud requirements
• Intelligent via real-time FortiGuard Labs threat feeds, AI/ML-based correlation, and GenAI-powered policy and investigation tools

Fragmented vs. Integrated: The Core Divide in SASE

At its core, SASE is supposed to simplify and secure network access across users, locations, and devices. But many vendors fall short because their architectures consist of third-party point products stitched together with APIs and custom integrations. This results in:

• Disjointed policy enforcement across edge and cloud
• Multiple agents and consoles required for management
• Redundant data silos and threat detection engines
• Bottlenecks in performance and troubleshooting
• Higher false positive rates due to disconnected detection engines

Independent testing reveals that vendors like Cisco, Cloudflare, and Skyhigh all failed critical security service edge (SSE) scenarios in CyberRatings’ 2024 evaluations.

Fortinet Unified SASE avoids these pitfalls with a single-vendor platform approach designed to securely span the entire connection—from the endpoint to the cloud edge and beyond. FortiOS provides consistent enforcement logic across both on-prem and cloud-delivered functions. FortiGuard Labs powers and consolidates all security services with shared threat intelligence. FortiClient delivers a single-agent experience to simplify management and optimize the end-user experience. And centralized orchestration ensures visibility and control throughout the environment.

This unique native integration strategy enhances security outcomes, streamlines operations, and delivers a superior user experience.

Converged Networking and Security in a Single Architecture

Unified SASE integrates all core SASE functions under a single architecture:

• Secure SD-WAN for dynamic routing, application-aware traffic shaping, and resilient connectivity across sites and branches
• Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) and secure web gateway (SWG) to protect cloud access and web traffic
• Zero-trust network access (ZTNA) to enforce application-level access control with continuous verification
• Cloud access security broker (CASB) for SaaS visibility and control
• Digital experience monitoring (DEM) to optimize end-user performance

While some vendors focus only on the SSE, Fortinet Unified SASE combines networking and security in equal measure. That convergence matters. When your SD-WAN and cloud-delivered security are managed and enforced together, policies are aligned, performance is optimized, management is simplified, and troubleshooting is faster.

This flexibility extends across various use cases, enabling customers to deploy security consistently, regardless of whether traffic originates from a branch, remote users, or multi-cloud environments.

One Agent and One Management Plane

Many SASE deployments require multiple agents on the endpoint—one for networking, another for ZTNA, a third for SWG. Fortinet eliminates this complexity. FortiClient supports networking and security functions through a single, lightweight agent.

On the backend, policy enforcement and visibility are unified through a common management framework built on FortiOS and centralized orchestration tools. This enables administrators to:

• Define access policies once and apply them consistently across edge and cloud
• Monitor user, application, and threat activity in real time
• Manage compliance, troubleshooting, and performance analytics in a single workflow

Unified visibility reduces the risk of misconfiguration and ensures users receive secure access without delays or dead ends.

Powered by the Fortinet Security Fabric and Intelligence 

Fortinet Unified SASE is not a standalone silo. It is part of the Fortinet Security Fabric—an open and extensible platform that shares telemetry, threat intelligence, and enforcement logic across your entire environment: on-prem, in the cloud, and at the edge.

This includes:

• Real-time updates from FortiGuard Labs
• AI/ML-driven detection and response for known and unknown threats
• GenAI assistants that simplify policy creation, investigation, and response
• Contextual sharing of user identity, posture, and behavior across enforcement points

These capabilities enable Fortinet to detect and respond more quickly across the kill chain, automatically correlating events from the endpoint to the edge and the cloud.

Built to Scale Globally—with Sovereign SASE Options 

Fortinet operates a globally distributed network of SASE points of presence (POPs) to deliver low-latency performance and high availability, while supporting flexible deployment options that adapt to an organization’s structure, compliance requirements, and data residency mandates.

For organizations with regulatory obligations, Fortinet also offers sovereign SASE capabilities, ensuring regional policy enforcement, compliance visibility, and local data control.

This flexibility enables multinationals, government agencies, and regulated industries to adopt SASE without compromising on sovereignty, privacy, or performance.

Use Cases That Demand Unified SASE

Unified SASE delivers practical value in the real world:

• Hybrid workforce security: Supports remote, roaming, and office-based users without sacrificing performance or security
• Branch transformation: Replaces legacy MPLS with application-aware SD-WAN and cloud-delivered security while extending consistent enforcement across on-prem appliances and cloud POPs
• High-compliance environments: Ensures visibility and control over all access points, data flows, and application use across regions

Fortinet Unified SASE is built to meet these needs wherever and however you need them—whether locally or on a global scale.

Why Fortinet?

Fortinet is one of the only vendors with proven leadership in both networking and security. While others specialize in one or the other, Fortinet brings decades of expertise in firewalling, secure connectivity, ASIC acceleration, networking, and platform integration.

Our unified approach—underpinned by FortiOS, FortiGuard, FortiClient, and centralized management—delivers what other SASE solutions only promise: a converged platform that simplifies operations, improves performance, and reduces risk.