Fortinet Accelerate 2025 – The rise of sovereign SASE

If you already hear the tune of the Imperial March sounding in the back of your head while reading the title, you might need to change your expectations. It is not Luke Skywalker, not Darth Vader, not Yoda or some stormtroopers who are the hero of this article. No, it is -angel sounds- FortiSASE!

The development on the solution keeps on running like a train, with new enhancements and additional fine-tuning being added continuously. Every month, a new version is being released. This can be tracked by the version number that indicates year.quarter.month.

The most recent enhancements include agentless ZTNA, a network lockdown mode, central management via FortiManager and added support for new datacenter locations.

But what really grabbed our attention at the conference, was a black flight case/server rack combination. Inside, we could take a look at one of the first sovereign SASE pods that we had ever seen. Sovereign SASE is just like regular FortiSASE, a solution that focuses on securing remote workers and providing zero trust connectivity to corporate SaaS and private applications. But whereas FortiSASE is hosted and managed by Fortinet in their own datacenters or GCP, Sovereign SASE allows you to host a SASE pod yourself.

The pod basically exists of a number of servers and FortiGates that run the same services as you would expect if you purchased the traditional FortiSASE offering. Management of such a pod should be pretty similar as we are used to. Only the lack of multitenancy at the moment can be a bit of a burden, but we heard that this is one of the top priorities on Fortinet’s agenda.

Sovereign SASE is specifically focused on customers who want to host the FortiSASE solution in their own datacenters and do not want to spend the time on building and maintaining a similar solution themselves, although perfectly possible as well. For the Belux region, we rather see opportunities for our Fortinet MSSP partners looking to build a managed secure connectivity solution. Sovereign SASE will become available to order within the next 6 weeks.

As we now see more and more customers in our own region successfully deploying FortiSASE, we can honestly confirm that Fortinet has entered the SASE market with an enterprise ready product. Yes, they were a little late to the party, but, right now, we believe that Fortinet has a mature solution which is also very price competitive compared to the competition. So, for any project that concerns securing remote users, it should be a no brainer to have a look at FortiSASE as well. FortiSASE, may the force be with you!