When secure access service edge (SASE) emerged in 2019, the industry enthusiastically embraced the concept of converging SD-WAN and secure service edge (SSE). If done right, SASE enables all users and devices, no matter where they reside, to access all an organization’s applications and digital capabilities in a secure, least-privileged, zero-trust method.
Now, five years into the SASE era, some organizations need to control where SASE operations take place. Some may want SASE tasks like data routing, inspection, and storage to be done “in region” because of new regulations or legislation pertaining to their industry vertical. For example, a healthcare organization might need to maintain control over their data to comply with Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and a bank may need to comply with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS).
Enter Sovereign SASE: A Turnkey Solution
Sovereign SASE is a turnkey solution for customers who aim to deliver private SASE services for internal or external consumption. It is offered as a kit designed for large enterprises, federal agencies, and service providers that want flexible connectivity. It’s ideal for organizations operating in highly regulated verticals with sensitive data like finance, government, and healthcare, or those who want to deploy SASE in their own air-gapped environment with strict isolation.
Fortinet Unified SASE and our SSE solution are hosted and managed by Fortinet with a vast, distributed cloud security network and global POP presence. By contrast, the Fortinet Sovereign SASE solution provides a comprehensive delivery option that enables organizations to maintain local control over inspection and logs.
Our Sovereign SASE customers route data to a location they own and ensure Fortinet’s full security stack protects the traffic in that location. This approach ensures robust data privacy and compliance while offering enhanced security and flexibility to large enterprises and service providers.
Learn more about sovereign SASE by watching our Fortinet Unified SASE Summit, “SASE Meets AI: Transform a Secure Hybrid World” on-demand, where you will get an exclusive look at the future of SASE and how it’s reshaping hybrid work security with insights from Fortinet customers, Google Cloud, and Gartner experts.
Delivering Your Own SASE Services
There are three main components of the Fortinet Sovereign SASE Service: the cloud orchestrator, the security inspection, and the Fortinet Security Fabric. The cloud orchestrator is hosted in Fortinet data centers. At the same time, the security inspection and Fortinet Security Fabric components are designed to be deployed in the customer or service provider’s data center closest to the users and business services.
The security inspection is powered by FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls, which could be hosted in private data center locations or Fortinet data centers using FortiGate-as-a-Service.
While Fortinet provides best-practice design and topologies, we give the customer autonomy over the design and deployment of their SASE service. Customers can choose how many FortiGates to deploy according to their intra- and inter-data center failover requirements.
The Importance of Flexible Connectivity
Fortinet Sovereign SASE is a solution designed for organizations, particularly those in highly regulated sectors like finance, government, and healthcare, that require localized control over their data and security operations. Sovereign SASE allows organizations to maintain control over data routing, inspection, and storage within their own data centers or chosen locations.
This new addition to the Fortinet Unified SASE portfolio provides another way for customers to take advantage of SASE. Fortinet Unified SASE is the industry’s most comprehensive, flexible, and intelligent solution, powered by a single operating system and managed through a single pane of glass.
Register to watch our Fortinet Unified SASE Summit on-demand
