Horizon for SASE Adoption Shortens, Fewer Sample Vendors Identified in SASE Category of Gartner Hype Cycle for Networking, 2021

Every year, Gartner issues its annual take on the networking industry, and this year is no different. The just-released Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking, 2021 and Hype Cycle for Network Security, 2021 provide snapshots of which networking and security technologies are on the rise — and which aren’t.

And when it comes to secure access service edge (SASE), the two reports provide an optimistic picture. The SASE market continues to mature, as evidenced by the horizon for widespread adoption. The horizon reduced significantly this year, dropping from 5-10 years in last year’s “Hype Cycle for Enterprise Networking 2020” to just 2-5 years in this year’s report.

At Cato Networks, we’ve certainly seen that change. Today, more than 900 customers, 11,000 sites and cloud instances, and well over a quarter of a million remote users rely on Cato every day. And we’ve seen large deployments, like Sixt Rent A Car, rely on the global Cato SASE platform to connect its more than 1,000 sites.

“Over the past year, we’ve seen larger enterprises adopt SASE,” says Yishay Yovel, CMO at Cato Network. “Converging networking and security into the global Cato SASE Cloud enables these enterprises to become more efficient and agile in addressing critical business initiatives for cloud migration, widespread remote access, and business restructuring and transformation.”

Cato Identified as a Sample Vendor for SASE

The reports also identify Cato as a Sample Vendor for the SASE category for the third year in a row. In addition, the number of sample vendors identified in the SASE category narrowed from 10 vendors to 6 vendors with the emergence of challenges delivering a cloud-native global SASE service.

In addition, Cato is only one of two vendors to be identified as a Sample Vendor in the SASE, ZTNA, and FWaaS categories, arguably the three most important sections for a SASE vendor. Zscaler is the second vendor, but, in our opinion, Zscaler is an SWG and lacks the NGFW enforcement and inspection of branch-to-datacenter traffic critical to enterprise deployments.

“We believe our recognition as a Sample Vendor across SASE, ZTNA, and FWaaS categories attest to Cato’s proven capabilities in delivering a complete networking and security platform for the enterprise,” says Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato Networks. “Through our Cato SPACE architecture, we provide the only global, cloud-native SASE solution that can be deployed, simply and easily, by organizations of all sizes to enable optimal and secure access to anyone, anywhere, and to any application.”

To learn more about the Hype Cycle for Networking, download your copy today.

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