Cato XDR Proves to Be a “Timesaver” for Redner’s Markets

“The Cato platform gave us better visibility, saved time on incident response, resolved application issues, and improved network performance ten-fold.”  

Nick Hidalgo, Vice President of IT and Infrastructure at Redner’s Markets 

At what point do security problems meet network architecture issues? For U.S. retailer Redner’s Markets, it was when the company’s firewall vendor required backhauling traffic just to gain visibility into traffic flows.  

Pulling traffic from the company’s 75 retail locations across Pennsylvania, Maryland, and Delaware led to “unexplainable” application problems. Loyalty applications failed to work correctly. Due to the unstable network, some of the grocer’s pharmacies couldn’t fax in their orders.   

Those and other complaints led Redner’s Markets’ vice president of IT and infrastructure, Nick Hidalgo, and his team to implement Cato SASE Cloud. “Transitioning to Cato allowed us to establish direct traffic paths from the branches, leading to a remarkable 10x performance boost and vastly improved visibility,” says Hidalgo. “The visibility you guys give us is better than any other platform we’ve had.” 

Redner’s Markets’ Trials Cato XDR  

When the opportunity came to evaluate Cato XDR, Hidalgo and his team signed up for the early availability program. “With our firewall vendor’s XDR platform, we only get half the story. We can see the endpoint process that spawned the story, but we lack the network context. Remediating incidents requires us to jump between three different screens.” 

By contrast, Cato XDR provides an Incident Detection and Response solution spanning network detection response (NDR) and endpoint detection response (EDR) domains. More than eight native, endpoint and network sensors feed Cato XDR – NGFW, SWG, ATP, DNS, ZTNA, CASB, DLP, RBI, and EPP. Typically, XDR platforms come with one or two native sensors and for most that means native data only from their EPP solution Cato XDR can also ingest data from third-party sensors.  

Cato automatically collects related incidents into detailed Gen-AI “stories”  using this rich dataset with built-in analysis and recommendations. These stories enable analysts to quickly prioritize, investigate, and respond to threat.AI-based threat-hunting capabilities create a prioritized set of suspected incident stories. Using Gen-AI, SOC analysts can efficiently manage and act upon stories using the incident analysis workbench built into the Cato management application. 

With Cato, Hidalgo found XDR adoption and implementation to be simple. “We fully deployed the Cato service easily, and each time we turn on a capability, we immediately start seeing new stories,” he says. “We enabled Data Loss Prevention (DLP) and immediately identified misuse of confidential information at one of our locations.” 

Having deployed Cato XDR and Cato EPP, Hidalgo gains a more holistic view of an incident. “Within our events screen, we now have a single view showing us all of the network and endpoint events relating to a story.”  

More broadly, Cato’s combination of deep incident insight and converged incident response tools has made his team more efficient in remediating incidents. “Cato XDR is a timesaver for us,” he says. “The XDR cards let us see all the data relating to an incident in one place, which is valuable. Seeing the flow of the attack through the network – the source of the attack, the actions taken, the timeframe, and more – on one page saves a lot of time. If a user has a network issue, I do not have to jump to various point product portals to determine where the application is being blocked.” 

Overall, the Cato platform and Cato XDR have proved critical for Redner’s Markets. “The Cato platform gave us better visibility, saved time on incident response, resolved application issues, and improved network performance ten-fold.”