Fortinet Moves Forward in Data Sovereignty with Sovereign SASE
We learn about the new products shown by the manufacturer of cybersecurity solutions during MWC 2025.
During the last Mobile World Congress, the cybersecurity company Fortinet exhibited one of its latest innovations: Sovereign SASE, designed so that service providers can develop their own dedicated private SASE service. Its aim, as Nirav Shah, vice president of Product and Solutions at Fortinet, explained, is to enable organisations to have unprecedented control and flexibility over their data, meeting the critical needs of highly regulated industries, such as finance, healthcare and government.
‘At this MWC we are showcasing our platform and how we are using convergence technologies and artificial intelligence. It makes it easier for service providers to build more efficient solutions and, at the same time, we can provide them with web cybersecurity techniques specifically to cover the SASE market, which has been visibly evolving over time,’ said Shah.
In the case of large enterprises there is a gap where SASE does not address all the requirements of service providers, and it is in that space that Fortinet has developed the Sovereign SASE solution: ‘It is a turnkey, customised solution that service providers can adopt. They can control the data plane and we can control the data and where it resides. This really helps them to use that service in a flexible way, because now they can have a better margin and they can focus on delivering their service faster to their customers at the same time. That’s the main objective of Sovereign SASE,’ he added during our conversation.
Sovereign SASE is very much focused on service providers, but Fortinet also explains that other organisations such as public entities and companies in the financial sectors with stringent requirements can make use of these capabilities.
When asked by this writer, Shah explained that the most important aspect of Sovereign SASE is its ability to ensure regulatory and compliance: ‘There are customers who can’t send traffic to a provider’s cloud because of their regulations. Sovereign SASE allows them to control where the data is. They can keep it in their data centre or in other private locations. Also, service providers want to have customised services for different customers, and with Sovereign SASE they can achieve this in a more granular way.
The Importance of AI in Cybersecurity Solutions
Naturally, we also had the chance to talk about artificial intelligence, a breakthrough that Fortinet has been implementing for the past five decades: ‘AI and machine learning are not new to us. We’ve been in business for 25 years, serving 800,000 customers globally. We started using machine learning 15 years ago because we receive terabytes of data from all our sensors on a daily basis. We developed machine learning to handle that data. SASE and other services use AI as part of our AI-powered services. These services enable functions such as IPS, web filtering, sandboxing, etc.,’ he said.
Moreover, it’s not just about AI protection, but also about simplifying operations using AI: ‘We started using what we call FortiAI, which is one of the integrated assistants in our products. For example, FortiAI is part of the AI capabilities of the system to manage our tools. These tools use the wizard system in this solution to help customers find threats and data faster and more efficiently.’
The next big leap at Fortinet will be the use of artificial intelligence agents, although Shah, declined to give away news that is about to come from the cybersecurity solutions maker. Silicon will be keeping an eye out for them to bring them to our readers.
