Cato Expands to Marseilles and Improves Resiliency Within France

Cato just announced the opening of our new PoP in Marseilles, France. Marseilles is our second PoP in France (Paris being the first) and our 20th in EMEA. Overall, Cato SASE Cloud is comprised of 70+ PoPs worldwide, bringing Cato’s capabilities to more than 150 countries.

As with all our PoPs, Marseilles isn’t just a “gateway” that secures traffic to and from the Internet. Cato PoPs are far more powerful. Like the rest of our PoPs, Marseilles will run Cato’s Single Pass Cloud Engine (SPACE), Cato’s converged cloud-native software. Cato SPACE provides enterprise-grade threat prevention, data protection, and global traffic optimization for East-West traffic to other Cato PoPs and North-South traffic to the Internet or the cloud.

Cato SPACE sets speed records in the SASE world by processing up to 3 Gbps of traffic per site with full decryption and all security engines active at line rate. Cato SPACE is so effective and reliable, that enterprises can replace legacy MPLS networks and security appliances.

The Marseilles PoP, like all of our PoPs, is equipped with multiple compute nodes running many SPACE engines. When a site’s traffic hits the Marseilles PoP, the traffic flow is immediately assigned to the most available SPACE engine.

Should a SPACE engine fail within a PoP, flows are automatically processed by another SPACE instance. Should the datacenter hosting a Cato PoP fail, users and resources automatically reconnect to the next available PoP as all PoPs are equipped with enough surplus capacity to accommodate the additional load.

A case in point was the recent Interxion datacenter outage. The datacenter housed the London Metal Exchange and Cato’s London PoP. The outage disrupted the Exchange for nearly five hours. Cato customers were also impacted – for 30 seconds – as London-connected sites, and users automatically and transparently moved over to Cato’s Manchester and Dublin PoPs. In the case of Marseilles, Cato’s self-healing architecture automatically and transparently moves sites and users to the next best PoP, likely the one in Paris.

“Before Cato, there were outages, complaints, and negative feedback from several internal teams about the service from our major international MPLS provider,” said Thomas Chejfec, Group CIO of Haulotte, a global manufacturer of materials and people lifting equipment. Haulotte moved to Cato after facing three years of delays and cost overruns, rolling out MPLS to its more than 30 offices across Western Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and Asia Pacific. “Since deploying Cato, the network is no longer a topic of discussion with users,” says Chejfec. “We never hear about it anymore.”

Of course, delivering a great cloud platform means having great partners. Cato’s complete range of networking and security capabilities are available today from numerous partners across France, including Ava6, ADVENS, Anetys, Hexanet, IMS Networks, OCD, NEOVAD, Nomios, Rampar, Sasety, and Selceon.

Cato continues to work hard to deliver and grow our global network. Marseilles is our latest launch, but hardly our last. Expect us to continue adding PoPs and growing our global footprint so you can connect and secure your offices and users wherever they may be located.