Green isn’t just our Logo Color:
Cato Network Contribution to
Fighting Climate Change
Cato’s mission, since we were founded in 2015, was to simplify IT infrastructure. Simplicity has many positive side effects: fewer errors, less downtime, less risk, and less effort. However, the way Cato chose to simplify IT is also contributing to the reduction of IT infrastructure carbon footprint.
Appliance elimination and consolidation
Cato’s approach to simplifying IT is to eliminate point solutions that often come in the form of physical appliances in branches and datacenters. Cato replaces these discrete distributed appliances with a shared cloud infrastructure. Our approach optimizes the resources required to deliver optimal and secure application access to all users and locations.
Why? Most appliance-based infrastructures are heavily underutilized. Work hours represent a small part of the day. Workloads vary by season. Appliances are over-provisioned to handle peak loads not average loads. As a result, each one of these appliances must remain operational 24/7/365 even when it is minimally used or not used at all while the power, cooling, and maintenance work must support them in full.
The Cato Impact: reducing the carbon footprint of 1,000 business locations every 3 months
Cato replaces the capabilities of these appliances with one or two small appliances (similar to home routers) and a cloud service. The cloud service is responsible for all the “heavy lifting” that would often require multiple appliances in each location while the Cato edge appliances only manage the connection to the cloud service.
The cloud service is shared across tens of thousands of locations and hundreds of thousands of users. A single machine within a Cato Point of Presence (PoP) in the cloud can serve hundreds of locations instead of using hundreds of networking and security appliances in these locations. The Cato Cloud architecture is built to seamlessly load balance incoming traffic across multiple machines keeping the Cato infrastructure “at work”. And, because the Cato architecture is built on cloud-first principles, new capabilities are deployed in the cloud and new appliances are avoided at the location.
But, carbon footprint reduction isn’t just about eliminating appliances. The power used in many datacenters Cato uses comes from renewable sources, so centralizing infrastructure in the cloud has virtually no carbon footprint at all.
Cato is committed to helping organizations make IT infrastructure simple, agile, and flexible. In the process, we replace oversized and underused resource “hogs” with efficient infrastructure powered by green energy.
