In the world of professional wrestling, one thing separates the legends from the rest: their presence in the ring. Like in wrestling, the digital world... Read ›
The PoP Smackdown: Cato vs. Competitors…Which Will Dominate Your Network? In the world of professional wrestling, one thing separates the legends from the rest: their presence in the ring. Like in wrestling, the digital world demands a robust and reliable presence for the ultimate victory. Enter Cato Networks, the undisputed champion regarding Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) Points of Presence (PoPs). In this blog post, we'll step into the ring and discover why Cato Networks stands tall as the best SASE PoP provider, ensuring businesses are always secure and connected.
SASE providers will talk about and even brag about their points of presence (PoPs) because it is the underlying foundation of their backbone network. But if you look a little closer, you will see that not all PoPs are the same and that the PoP capabilities vary greatly.
A point of presence is a data center containing specific components that allow the traffic to be inspected and enforce security. Sounds easy enough. It depends on how those PoPs are designed to function and where the PoPs are located to be of the most value to your organization.
Let’s look at the competition—first, the heavyweight hardware contender, Fortinet. Fortinet has twenty-two PoPs globally. Fortinet relies on its customer install base to do the networking and security inspection at every location globally. This adds complexity and multiple caveats to their SASE solution. The added complexity comes from managing numerous products, keeping them up to date with software and patches, and ensuring they are all configured correctly to enable the best possible protection.
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Next, the challenger to the heavyweight title, Palo Alto Networks. They claim many PoPs, but you need to look deeper at where those PoPs are hosted. The vast majority of PANs Prisma Access PoPs are in Google Cloud Platform and some in Amazon Web Services. This adds cost and complexity, making the solution more difficult to manage. Additionally, if you want to use multiple security features, your data will probably have to be forwarded to various PoPs to get full coverage…impacting performance. Since Palo Alto utilizes the public cloud infrastructure, many of the claimed PoPs are just on-ramps to the Google fiber backbone. This is not the best option if you are trying to balance connectivity, security, and cost.
Finally, we have Cato Networks. Cato has an impressive 80+ PoPs that are connected via Tier 1 ISPs, creating the world's largest full-mesh SASE-focused private backbone network. At Cato, all our security capabilities are available from every single PoP worldwide. Since Cato’s PoPs are cloud-native and purpose-built for security and networking functionality, it allows Cato to be highly agile and straightforward to manage…regardless of where your organization has its locations. Speaking of location, Cato has strategically placed our PoPs closest to major business centers all over the globe, including three PoPs in China, and new PoPs are added every quarter based on demand and customer requirements.
In the world of wrestling, champions rise to the occasion with unmatched presence and skills. Cato Networks proves itself as the ultimate champion in the realm of SASE with the best PoPs. With a global reach, low latency, battle-tested security, simplified management, cost-efficiency, and always-on connectivity, Cato Networks ensures your business operates securely and efficiently like a wrestling legend in the ring. So, if you are looking for the best SASE PoPs, look no further – Cato Networks is the undisputed champion!
