Fortinet Secure SD-WAN Enables Burger King Brazil to Realize Full Application Visibility and Network Control to Improve Security Across all Corporate and Restaurant Locations

SUNNYVALE, Calif., Jan. 21, 2020 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) —

John Maddison, EVP of Products and CMO at Fortinet
“With the goal of digital innovation, organizations continue to search for ways to improve upon their traditional WAN networks to provide customers with a superior end-user experience without opening themselves up to new cyber risks. With the continuing expanse of cyberattacks, security can never be an afterthought in any network deployment. Fortinet’s security-driven networking approach to SD-WAN offers customers like Burger King Brazil increased performance, visibility and control without sacrificing overall security.”

News Summary
Fortinet® (FTNT), a global leader in broad, integrated and automated cybersecurity solutions, today announced that Burger King Brazil, head franchisee of the Burger King and Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen restaurants, has implemented Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to gain high-performance networking capabilities that simplify operations, enhance business agility, and improve security across corporate and restaurant locations.

Burger King Brazil, a subsidiary of BURGER KING, the second largest fast food hamburger chain in the world, has been in the country nearly 20 years and has more than 800 stores across all states in Brazil. POPEYES®, also a restaurant chain of Burger King Brazil, began Brazilian operations in 2018 and currently has 23 restaurants. The company serves thousands of customers daily and relies on its internal network to carry out transactions from customer orders and conduct data analysis.

As the Burger King Brazil restaurant network continues to grow and the number of customers increases proportionally, so do the infrastructure and digital security requirements for the company. After completing internal performance evaluations of its security infrastructure, Burger King Brazil concluded it was time to modernize. This led the company to look for a security solution that could meet its visibility and network control needs in order to improve its internal database and customer security across all corporate and restaurant locations. Further, the restaurants’ infrastructure and digital security requirements required a solution that was scalable and could continue to grow with the company. Burger King Brazil selected Fortinet Secure SD-WAN to enable them to meet the challenges of improving application visibility, increasing information security, and broadening and automating network process control.

Initially, Burger King Brazil deployed Fortinet in 70 restaurants, making it the standard for all new restaurants to use this model. The Fortinet solutions offer the head franchisee simplified management, increased visibility, and the benefits of centralized management. More, Fortinet Secure SD-WAN has reduced the costs of internet connectivity by allowing the use of more inexpensive, targeted, and secure connections. Burger King Brazil was able to achieve higher bandwidth with lower WAN cost by transitioning from MPLS to a hybrid WAN using Fortinet’s Secure SD-WAN by migrating from MPLS and utilizing a multi-broadband that consolidates services. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN proved to be an essential technology for Burger King Brazil’s infrastructure, enabling the restaurant chain to streamline operations, prioritize core business activities, and improve in-store internet availability, as well as address previous in-store connectivity challenges across all restaurants.

By tapping into the power of Fortinet Secure SD-WAN integrated with FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, Burger King Brazil has achieved single-pane-of-glass centralized management with reporting and analytics across the SD-WAN environment. Fortinet Secure SD-WAN delivers complete next-generation firewall security, including IPS, anti-virus and anti-malware, web filtering, and SSL inspection (including TLS 1.3). Combined with FortiAnalyzer, Burger King Brazil drastically improved visibility to help reduce previous latency challenges, offering significantly improved performance. The Fortinet solution has helped Burger King Brazil to meet even the most robust availability needs, enabling the organization’s Operations Technology team to reduce the total number of open connectivity-related incidents by approximately 26 percent. With data protection and proactive internet connections, Burger King Brazil is now able to measure and control consumption, filter web browsing, block malicious file downloads, and reduce both the financial risks and technology and resource costs that come with decentralized management.

Burger King Brazil’s vision is to achieve comprehensive security through the Fortinet Security Fabric. Having achieved such favorable results during the first implementation stage of its Fortinet deployment, Burger King Brazil turned to Fortinet again to address future growth, including adding FortiClient as part of its antivirus deployment and optimizing FortiGate web application filter configurations for all corporate and restaurant network points. Further, knowing that restaurants are a concentrated source of attack vectors and an attractive target for cyber criminals, the company plans to deploy FortiGate Next-Generation Firewalls (NGFWs) in all locations, along with FortiWeb, and application control measures.

Supporting Quote
“Fortinet Secure SD-WAN enables integrated security and simpler management to allows us to evaluate existing risks and gain better visibility into the applications and types of attacks in our data centers. Having this level of control over our environment was a big factor in our decision to choose Fortinet Secure SD-WAN. We have embraced the Fortinet Security Fabric’s integrated approach to security and plan to implement additional Fortinet solutions across our restaurants.”
– Clayton Malheiros, CFO, Burger King Brazil