Spark New Zealand has selected Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to expand and differentiate its service offerings to corporate, enterprise and government customers.

By leveraging Fortinet Secure SD-WAN, Spark will be able to deliver better application experience, automate network security operations, and provide better cost efficiency to customers across New Zealand, the telecommunication provider says.

"The solution also makes it easy for corporate, enterprise and government customers to implement network changes that ensure business continuity for an expanding remote workforce with minimal requirement for IT staff and infrastructure resources. Spark also leverages zero-touch provisioning to more quickly enable new customer deployments compared to other services," it says.

Spark has also chosen to deploy Fortinet Secure SD-WAN across its own retail locations, resulting in improved performance, strengthened services from an infrastructure perspective, and increased network stability.

“Customer experience is our number one priority at Spark, so we only use solutions that make connecting seamless, and perform for our customers," says Shelby Ighani, security infrastructure manager at Spark NZ.

"Fortinet is a strong partner with proven solutions. Working with Fortinet has added multiple strings to our bow in terms of the services we provide our enterprise customers. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers great value for Spark customers, as well as a mature and powerful security solution.

The announcement comes as Fortinet builds on its partnership with Spark that resulted the physical migration of 2,500 sites, many in remote locations. According to Fortinet, it was aided by API-driven automation to successfully and seamlessly finish ahead of schedule. The company was now partnering with Spark to achieve complete WAN transformation for a number of other major clients across New Zealand.

Spark leverages the Fortinet Network Security Expert (NSE) Institute's training and certification programme to broaden employees' security skill sets and learn how to deploy Fortinet's industry-leading security products and solutions. Spark has the largest NSE-certified team in New Zealand.

The Fortinet NSE Institute offers an eight-level training and certification programme that is designed to provide interested professionals with the ability to configure, install and troubleshoot a comprehensive security solution.

“We're proud to partner with Spark NZ and share its commitment to delivering security-driven networking solutions," adds John Maddison, EVP of products and CMO at Fortinet.

"Fortinet Secure SD-WAN offers service providers like Spark the ability to onboard customers faster and deliver a solution that enhances customers' application and cloud experience.

Fortinet was earlier named a 2020 Gartner Peer Insights Customers' Choice for WAN Edge Infrastructure.