Independent Compliance and Security Assessment – Two Additions to the All-New Cato Management Application

Dave Greenfield

14/12/2021

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If a picture tells a thousand words, then a new user interface tells a million. The new Cato Management Application that we announced today certainly brings a scalable, powerful interface. But it’s far more than just another pretty face. It’s a complete restructuring of the backend event architecture and a new frontend with more than 103 improvements.

New dashboards and capabilities can be found throughout the platform. We improved cloud insight with a new advanced cloud catalog. New independent conformance testing for regulatory compliance and security capabilities is, I think, a first in the industry. We enhanced security reporting with an all-new threats dashboard and opened up application performance with another new dashboard. Let’s take a closer look at some of these changes.

New Topology View and a New Backend

The top-level topology view has been redesigned to accommodate deployments of thousands of sites and tens of thousands of users. But in the new Management Application, we’ve enabled customization of the top-level view, enabling you to decide how much detail to show across all edges — sites, remote users, and cloud assets — connected to and are secured by Cato SASE Cloud (see Figure 1).

Figure 1 Cato’s new Management Application lets enterprises continue to manage their network, security, and access infrastructure from a common interface (1). The new front-end is completely customizable and can surface the providers (2) connecting sites and remote users. You can easily identify problematic sites (3) and drill down into a user or location’s stats at a click (4).

Behind the Cato Management Application is a completely rearchitected backend. Improved query analytics for site metrics and events makes the process more efficient and the interface more responsive even with customer environments generating over 2 billion events per day. A new event pipeline increases the event retrieval volume while allowing NetOps and NetSecOps to be more specific and export just the necessary events.

Cato Management Application<br /> [30 min Walkthrough] | Take the Tour

Independent Compliance Rating Revolutionizes Compliance and Security Verification

A new cloud application catalog has been introduced with 5000 of the most common enterprise applications. For each application, the catalog includes a detailed description of the target app automatically generated by a proprietary data mining service and an independently verified risk score (see Figure 2).

*Figure 2: The new Cloud Apps Catalog contains more than 5000 applications with an overall risk score*

The risk score is based on Cato’s automated and independent assessment of the cloud application’s compliance levels and security capabilities. Using the massive data lake we maintain of the metadata from every flow crossing Cato’s Global Private Backbone, machine learning algorithms automatically check an application’s claimed regulatory compliance and security features. Currently, Cato regulatory compliance verification includes HIPAA, PCI, and SOC 1-3. Security feature verification includes MFA, encryption of data at rest, and SSO (see Figure 3).

Independent-Compliance-and-Security-Assessment-–-Two-Additions-to-the-All-New-Cato-Management-Application-Figure-3 — *Figure 3: Cato independently verifies the application’s conformance with regulations and security features*

New Threat Dashboard Identifies Key Threats Across the Enterprise

The new Threat Dashboard summarizes the insights drawn from Cato’s Managed IPS, FWaaS, SWG, and Anti-Malware services. Through a single dashboard, security teams can see the top threats across the enterprise. A dynamic, drill-down timeline allows security teams to gather more insight. Top hosts and users identify the impacted individuals and endpoints (Figure 4).

New Application Dashboard Provides Snapshot of Usage Analytics

With the new Application Dashboard, you gain an overall view of your enterprise application analytics. Administrators can easily understand current and historical bandwidth consumption and flow generation by combinations of sites, users, applications, domains, and categories (Figure 5).

Figure 5: The new Application Analytics dashboard provides an overview of an application usage that can be easily segmented by combinations of multiple dimensions. In this case, application consumption is shown for each user at a particular site.

The Cato Management Application is currently available at no additional charge. To learn more about the management platform, click here or check out this 30 min walkthrough video. You can also contact us for a personal demo.

Dave Greenfield

Dave Greenfield is a veteran of IT industry. He’s spent more than 20 years as an award-winning journalist and independent technology consultant. Today, he serves as a secure networking evangelist for Cato Networks.