Like many retailers, Pet Lovers needed an effective way to secure its stores and franchises. The spread of massive ransomware outbreaks, such as NotPetya, made firewalling particularly important.

Pet Lovers had already connected and secured traffic between stores with an Internet-based, virtual private network (VPN). Routers at every store directed point-of-sale (POS) traffic across the IPsec VPN to firewalls in the company’s Singapore datacenter housing its POS servers.

But other than the datacenter and four stores, none of the locations had firewalls to protect them against malware and other attacks. Protection was particularly important as employees accessed the Internet directly.

Adding firewall or unified threat management (UTM) appliances at each site would have been cost prohibitive and taken far too long to deploy. For those sites equipped with firewall appliances, managing them was “tedious and slow,” says David Whye Tye Ng, the CEO & Executive Director at Pet Lovers. All security policy changes had to be implemented by the local service provider running the firewalls.

SD-WAN for Retail

He considered connecting the sites via an MPLS service. But following a “meticulous” assessment of the costs and offerings of the managed service, he says that neither MPLS nor deploying security appliances could meet his needs for low-cost, rapid deployment, and ongoing management.

“We did not want to be held hostage to the costs of MPLS and wanted a security solution that would be scalable and simple,” he says.

Download the complete case study here and learn more about how Ng used Cato Cloud and it’s built-in Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) to revolutionize his network.