Cato Networks Secures $30M to Accelerate Customer Adoption of Networking and Security in the Cloud

September 13th, 2016

 Announces general availability of the world’s first software-defined and cloud-based secure enterprise network

TEL AVIV, Israel, September 13, 2016 Cato Networks, provider of the world’s first software-defined and cloud-based network with built-in enterprise security, today announced that it has raised $30M in a series B funding round. The financing was led by Greylock Partners, with participation from Singtel Innov8 and existing investors U.S. Venture Partners (USVP), Aspect Ventures and the company’s founders, Shlomo Kramer and Gur Shatz. The funding will allow Cato Networks to offer its cloud-based network security as a service (#NSaaS) solution, the Cato Cloud, to the global market, bringing the cloud’s transformative power to networking and security.

“Cato Networks is at the forefront of a significant shift in networking and security infrastructure. By combining network cost savings and network security infrastructure elimination, Cato is leading a cloud-based transformation in networking and security, mirroring the way cloud has redefined all other pillars of the IT infrastructure including applications, storage and computing.” says Jerry Chen, Partner at Greylock Partners and Cato Board member. “These market dynamics, coupled with the extensive industry experience and expertise of the Cato team, make us extremely excited about the future potential of the company and the impact it can have on networking and security.”

Today’s funding round, which is Cato Networks’ second after securing a $20 million series A round in June 2015, underscores a growing realization that the cloud will alter the way that enterprises address networking and security. This is already occurring in the marketplace, as organizations look to address burdensome network and security complexity.

“UMHS is spread across 13 locations in North Carolina, connected by a combination of firewalls, Internet and MPLS links. We looked for ways to streamline our IT infrastructure, cut costs and complexity, and improve security”, said Leslie Cothren, Director of IT at UMHS. “We deployed Cato over a period of 4 weeks and were able to eliminate 5 physical firewalls in our remote locations. The Cato Cloud provides us with both WAN connectivity and Internet security as well as better visibility and control over our distributed environment. We no longer need to manage separate physical boxes at every location or deal with refreshes, patches or capacity upgrades. We plan to extend the deployment by moving to Internet-based connectivity in all offices and connecting them to Cato.”

“Cato offers a totally new way to cut the cost and complexity of legacy, on-premise networking and security solutions by delivering them as a holistic, agile and scalable cloud service,” says Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. “We aim to strengthen security posture with an agile network security platform that can scale to support any business need and rapidly adapt to emerging threats. Cato is paving the way for a new, scalable and simplified networking and security platform for enterprises of all sizes, and offers lucrative opportunities for channel partners in the networking and security domains.”

Cato Networks was recently listed as a sample vendor in Gartner Analyst Greg Young’s report, “Hype Cycle for Infrastructure Protection, 2016,” in the firewall-as-a-service category written by Jeremy D’Hoinne.

“Firewall as a service (FWaaS) is a firewall delivered as a cloud-based service or hybrid solution (that is, cloud plus on-premises appliances). The promise of FWaaS is to provide simpler and more-flexible architecture by leveraging centralized policy management, multiple enterprise firewall features and traffic tunneling to partially or fully move security inspections to a cloud infrastructure.”, said Jeremy D’Hoinne, a Gartner analyst. “FWaaS offers a significantly different architecture for branches or even single-site organizations. It also offers greater visibility through centralized policy, increased flexibility, and potentially reduced cost by using a fully or partially hosted security workload.”*

Major benefits of utilizing the Cato Cloud include:

  • Elimination of distributed networking and security appliances, and drastic reduction in the cost and complexity of buying, deploying, upgrading and patching them
  • Reduction of MPLS connectivity costs by dynamically offloading internet and WAN traffic to affordable and resilient internet links
  • Direct access to the internet at all remote locations, without deploying a dedicated on-premise network security stack
  • Ability to leverage an affordable, low-latency and global WAN between enterprise locations
  • Enforcement of a unified policy across remote locations, mobile users, and physical and cloud infrastructure without using multiple point solutions
  • Strengthened security posture with an agile, scalable and adaptable network security platform

“With the general availability of the Cato Cloud service and the rapid global deployment of the Cato Cloud Network, enterprises can cut cost and complexity out of their IT infrastructures while improving security posture and enterprise agility”, adds Gur Shatz, CTO of Cato Networks. “The Cato Cloud is currently in production with our first global, multi-site corporation and we are running concurrent pilots for different use cases across dozens of organizations”.