M+E Connections

Forrester Consulting Group and Gentiva Health Services provided an in-depth overview of a recent study on Fortinet Secure SD-WAN during the webinar “Forrester TEI Study Reveals Impactful Business Outcome of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN” on Jan. 25.

Speakers discussed the overall SD-WAN market, customer journeys including Gentiva’s, and key results from the study.

For the study, Forrester took a multistep approach in evaluating the impact of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN for economic metrics around benefits, costs, flexibility and risks.

To complete the study, Forrester interviewed stakeholders from organizations that use the Fortinet solution, to build results based on a composite organization representing the financial services, healthcare, manufacturing and retail sectors, Rami Rammaha, director of product marketing at Fortinet, said at the start of the webinar.

“These were very large deployments ranging from 750 to 8,500 sites,” he told viewers.

“When we first saw [it] come on the market four or five years ago,” there was a lot of “hype and recognition around it, and everybody was talking about it, Andre Kindness, principal analyst at Forrester, recalled.

But “companies that actually have used it for six months and have fully deployed it and are really using it to its value,” Kindness  said. “That’s the important part,” he noted, adding that adoption remains “relatively low.”

“Four or five years ago, everybody had talked about SD-WAN as lowering internet costs,” Kindness said. But “that was a red herring, a bunch of nonsense,” he said.

Since then, there has been a “transition in the market itself” that he said has “forced people to wrap things together and cobble things together to a much more integrated system that’s built from the ground up.”

And “this is why you see this 18 percent” adoption rate now, he said, predicting “we’ll see the adoption being much quicker as the market itself realizes the integrated system [is] a much easier thing to implement and there’s a much more value behind it.”

Kris Peterson, senior consultant at Forrester, went on to provide some details about the report, saying “we started with the due diligence phase [that] included discussions with internal stakeholders at Fortinet to understand the value proposition of their secure SD-WAN solution.”

“We spoke to decision makers at these organizations and discussed their journey as a customer, and we focused in on the differences between their current operations after deploying the Fortinet solution and then the state of their operations,” according to Peterson. “Prior to implementing the solution, based on the range of experiences that we heard from these customers, we created a hypothetical closet organization that served as the basis for our three year financial model.”

The analysis was then “peer reviewed, client reviewed and customer reviewed as well to help ensure accuracy, quality  and reasonableness,” Peterson said.

Among the participants, the “scale of their operations covered a very broad range from 3,500 to 133,000 employees, and from 750 sites all the way up to 8,500,” according to Peterson.

“The interviewees discussed some prior challenges that they faced with the legacy solutions that really compelled them to work with Fortinet, Peterson pointed out. “These challenges included insufficient security coverage. Tools were in place, but many felt that they were just inadequate given the threat level they faced,” Peterson said.

“Legacy solutions were also lacking in network managing management and monitoring capabilities,” Peterson noted, adding: “Finally, the customers were facing unsustainable” cost increases.

“The solution requirements across these customers boiled down to a few things,” according to Peterson, citing  the need for a standardized, centralized, scalable solution as one of them. “Two, enhanced user security on global networks. Better visibility and faster resolution to minimize down. And, finally, the ability to segregate and control traffic flow and effectively block cyberattacks.”

“The benefits that were observed by these customers fall into two primary categories,” the first one an increase in operational efficiencies, said Peterson. “Customers observed time savings on deployment of the solution and ongoing network administration. Employee productivity increases as a result of having a more reliable network with fewer disruptions and savings were also observed related to communication costs,” he said.

Second, there were “benefits related to reduced security risks,” Peterson said. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN “led to organizations facing fewer threats [and] fewer threats leads to less time spent on issue resolution for the threats that were still present,” he said. Fortinet also “enabled quicker resolution resulting in additional time savings,” he added.

Chris McWhorter, senior network engineer at Gentiva, went on to discuss his company’s experience with Fortinet Secure SD-WAN.