Cato Networks

For decades, enterprise networking and security were synonymous with 'boxes'—stacks of expensive, specialized hardware at every location. This model has become unsustainable in a cloud-first world where users and applications are everywhere. Cato Networks represents a fundamental shift away from this hardware-centric model toward a cloud-native service. By moving the heavy lifting of traffic inspection and routing to the Cato SASE Cloud, organizations can radically simplify their office environment, lower their total cost of ownership, and significantly improve their security posture. This 'lean edge' architecture allows IT teams to focus on setting high-level business intents and security policies rather than managing the day-to-day maintenance and patching of multiple hardware appliances. The result is a more agile, secure, and cost-effective infrastructure that is built for the speeds and distribution of the modern business world.

The performance of mission-critical SaaS applications like Microsoft 365, Salesforce, and Zoom is often at the mercy of the public internet, which is plagued by latency, packet loss, and routing inconsistencies. Cato Networks solves this by using its global private backbone as an 'express lane' for cloud traffic. When a user connects to a SaaS application through Cato, their traffic is immediately moved onto the Cato backbone at the nearest PoP and carried over an optimized private path to the PoP closest to the cloud provider's data center. This architectural advantage eliminates the unpredictability of the open web and ensures that employees always have a fast, consistent experience, regardless of their location. For global enterprises, this can translate to significant improvements in productivity and a much smoother transition to cloud-based workflows.

One of the greatest challenges for modern IT teams is the lack of visibility across their fragmented network and security infrastructure. Logs are often scattered across dozens of different consoles, making it nearly impossible to identify the root cause of an issue or spot a sophisticated cyber attack. Cato Networks solves this with its converged data model. Every networking and security event across the entire global enterprise—from a failed login attempt in a branch office to a latency spike for a remote user—is captured in a single, unified data lake and presented through a single console. This holistic visibility allows IT teams to move from reactive 'firefighting' to proactive management, identifying trends and potential risks before they impact the business. It also significantly reduces the time required for security audits and forensic investigations, providing a single source of truth for the entire digital infrastructure.

As the traditional network perimeter dissolves, the old model of 'trust but verify' is being replaced by Zero Trust. Cato Networks builds zero-trust principles directly into its global SASE cloud. Every user, device, and application is continuously verified, and access is granted based on the principle of least privilege. Unlike legacy VPNs that give users broad access to the internal network once authenticated, Cato's ZTNA solution ensures that a user only sees and interacts with the specific applications they are authorized to use. This isolation prevents the lateral movement of attackers and significantly reduces the overall risk of a major data breach. Because this protection is delivered as a global cloud service, it follows the user wherever they go, providing a consistent and secure experience for the work-from-anywhere world.

Detecting sophisticated cyber attacks requires more than just a firewall; it requires the ability to correlate data from across the entire network. Cato XDR (Extended Detection and Response) leverages the massive data set generated by the Cato SASE Cloud to identify complex attack patterns that would be invisible to siloed security products. Using advanced AI and machine learning, Cato XDR can automatically identify and remediate threats like account takeovers, data exfiltration, and lateral movement. Because Cato sees all the traffic—both internal (east-west) and external (north-south)—it can provide a much deeper level of protection than traditional security tools. This converged approach to threat detection ensures that enterprises are always one step ahead of the attackers, with a security platform that is constantly learning and evolving to meet new challenges.