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Medium-sized enterprises face a broad range of challenges in networking and security. Cato addresses those challenges by integrating the two domains in what a recent 451 Research recently described as representing “one of the significant conceptual takedowns of security-as-overlay.” You can read the report in its entirety here.
Noting that Cato is “disruptive” and offering a “new breed of network as a service,” the 451 Research report points out that Cato addresses a list of networking and security pain points felt by medium-sized distributed enterprises. In terms of networking, the WAN is incompatible with the modern enterprise on several levels:
- MPLS is a major cost item with huge lead times necessary for new deployments.
- Backhauling of Internet traffic is quickly outstripping existing MPLS links, driving the introduction of technologies like SD-WAN. Yet, backhauling Internet traffic still makes little sense and causes a trombone effect – added latency which impacts the user experience.
- Direct internet access (DIA) at the branch, which is the natural thing to do, is costly and complex because a full security stack must be deployed in each location.
- The WAN doesn’t naturally extend beyond physical locations to accommodate the new tenants of the enterprise, the cloud and mobile users.
At the same time, security appliances are incompatible with the modern enterprise for several reasons including:
- Appliances need to be bought, deployed, maintained, upgraded and retired.
- Appliances cover only the local network segment. Many pieces are needed to cover the full network.
- Appliances need the support, care and feeding of an experienced staff.
- Appliance software updates are lagging because they are high risk and complex. This drops appliance effectiveness over time.
The 451 Research notes that Cato addresses these areas and while there are other players in networking and security markets none can match Cato’s value proposition. As 451 puts it “…. We view Cato as differentiated by its purpose-built, converged secure cloud-networking stack and multi-tenant architecture, which does not tie customers to PoPs, is not composed of custom appliances for customers (other than access sockets) and is unlikely to incur traditional scaling and activity costs attributable to customer expansion….”
To read the full report click here