BWT Alpine Formula One Team Built the Network Behind Its Most Ambitious Season

Baltimore Aircoil Replaces MPLS with Cato, Improving Voice Quality, Enabling Video Conferencing, and Increasing Agility Summary: Formula One is decided at speed, on track and off it. For BWT Alpine Formula One Team, the network connecting trackside operations to the factory is key to on-track efficient delivery. It carries some of the most sensitive competitive data in sport and must be rebuilt at 25 circuits a year, often under intense time pressure. The team needed a network transformation built for speed, security, and constant change. Heading into 2026’s biggest regulation reset in years, BWT Alpine Formula One Team deployed the Cato SASE Platform, converging networking and security onto a single platform built for the pace of the sport. The result: trackside environments live in minutes, data reaching engineers in almost real time, and security that finally enables rather than restricts. Key Results Time to access race data cut from 20–30 minutes to seconds Trackside environment setup reduced from hours to minutes Device onboarding reduced from ~5 steps to 1 4+ legacy platforms consolidated into one centrally managed SASE platform The Environment That Demands Everything For most enterprises, networking and security are a balancing act. Bandwidth is weighed against cost, controls against usability, and inspection against latency. For BWT Alpine Formula One Team, that tradeoff does not exist. Performance is the business, and network or security failures are not abstract IT risks, they translate directly into competitive outcomes on track. “In Formula One, everything we do is driven by data,” said Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team. “Our role in IT is to make sure that data gets to the right people, at the right time, securely, without limiting creativity or innovation.” That mandate plays out in one of the most extreme digital environments in professional sport. The team’s entire on-track set-up moves roughly 25 times a year, following the Formula One calendar from continent to continent. “Every race weekend, we’re effectively standing up a temporary enterprise in a new country,” said David. “You have very limited time to get everything working, and absolutely no tolerance for gaps, operationally or from a security point of view.” "Every race weekend, we're effectively standing up a temporary enterprise in a new country."  Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team Each event generates up to 1.5TB of data over the course of the weekend, with live telemetry streaming at 8Mb per second per car. Real-time communication between trackside engineers and factory-based strategists is equally non-negotiable. For David and Chris Mayhew, the team’s IT Infrastructure Manager, that meant infrastructure that could be trusted completely. Simplicity, Performance, and Resiliency “2026 is a massive opportunity for us,” David said. “It’s a chance to transform our infrastructure and how we operate.” Formula One saw the biggest regulation reset in years in 2026. The team launched the A526: a completely new car from front to back, chassis to power unit. In terms of IT infrastructure, David said: “We need simplicity, performance, and resiliency at the heart of everything we do.” The existing fragmented stack couldn’t deliver it. There were four separate platforms, each with its own policy model and limited visibility: MPLS networking, a web proxy that capped trackside bandwidth to 100Mbps, a legacy VPN, and firewall. Any policy change had to be configured across each. Traffic routed through heavyweight tunnels added latency at every step. “We were creating barriers for people to really innovate with new technologies,” said David. Cato replaced all of it. “You’re able to achieve all of that on your own roadmap,” said Mayhew, “with much more ease and in a far shorter time than if you were to use a multitude of different vendors.” “It was a straightforward tick box in all of those areas,” said David. “We chose the technology because it met everything we needed to do.” The Right Start IT staff are among the first to arrive at every circuit. Their job is to establish the link to the Enstone factory (the team’s HQ in the United Kingdom) before the rest of the team walks in. Once that connection is live, engineers at the factory can begin working, even while hardware from the previous race is still in transit. “We work as one team,” said Paul Briggs, the team’s Senior Network Engineer. “There are colleagues trackside and in Enstone, all focused on the same goal.” Get behind at the start, and both sides are waiting. “Before, we may have been three or four hours behind getting our internet connectivity set up,” said Mayhew. “Now, it literally is: we have an internet connection in any form, and Cato will come up. I could probably send an engineer who has never been to track before, tell them where to plug a cable in, and we would see the service come up.” "I could probably send an engineer who has never been to track before, tell them where to plug a cable in, and we would see the service come up."  Chris Mayhew, IT Infrastructure Manager Behind that simplicity is Cato's edge device, the Cato Socket. The moment it has power, it finds the nearest of Cato's 100+ Points of Presence and brings the full environment up. “We’ve got confidence that the service will come up as it always does,” said Mayhew. “There is no fault resolution to do. Services are active almost from the moment you plug in.” That confidence holds through the race weekend. “Our biggest win with Cato is the ease of the SD-WAN,” said Mayhew. “We could have a loss of service for one of those internet connections, and we’ve got confidence that not only the connection would fail over, but all of the services that are using that connection would seamlessly fail over with it as well.” At one test event this season, the primary connection from a trackside ISP went down. Live telemetry, engineer communication, everything running on that connection was at risk. But Cato’s SD-WAN automatically switched to the secondary connection. Engineers at the track and Enstone kept working. No one noticed. Data When the Decision Has to Be Made The value of data in Formula One is measured in the time it takes to act on it. Trackside connections carry live telemetry from both cars, real-time communication with Enstone, and data flowing through the third-party services that support race operations. Each one is a critical path. If a connection is slow, engineers wait. If it’s invisible, no one knows why. Before Cato, that invisibility was the reality. “You set it up, it functions,” Mayhew said, “but actually, what’s going across that connectivity, what’s happening? Trying to troubleshoot and fault-find these issues would have taken a lot more time to pinpoint what was happening.” Now every connection is observable end-to-end. Latency is tracked, bottlenecks visible, SaaS integrations consistent. And because networking and security run on the same platform, traffic never detours to a separate proxy for inspection. No blind spots between tools. No latency penalty for being secure. “Engineers can now get access to data that previously would have taken us 20, 30 minutes to retrieve,” said David. “Now, when the car is traveling between corners 2 and 3, the data is there immediately. It’s a real impact directly on track.” At most circuits, that’s under 30 seconds into any lap. “Now, when the car is traveling between corners 2 and 3, the data is there immediately. It’s a real impact directly on track.” Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team “It’s not just the performance when the platform’s running normally,” David said. “It’s how quickly we can get to those solutions. Cato SASE Platform makes us more agile as a team and more efficient, which ultimately increases the performance of the car.” Security Without Barriers Heading into 2026, one goal was non-negotiable: replace security controls that created friction with ones built for how the team actually operates. “Formula One engineers are some of the most intelligent people in the world. If there is a barrier in their way, they will find a way around it,” said David. “Our job is to make sure there are no barriers, just performance.” The foundation is visibility. “That single pane of glass is massive for us,” said Briggs. “We can see what’s connected, what it’s talking to, and whether that behavior is expected.” For a team that moves so frequently, the VPN was a constant friction point: slow, inconsistent, and over-permissive. Cato's Universal ZTNA replaced it with access that follows the engineer rather than the location. “Their laptop is an extension of the network,” said Mayhew. “Wherever they are, they’re able to access the services they need.” As BWT Alpine Formula One Team expands its use of SaaS platforms and AI-driven tools, new data-handling risks emerge, particularly around inadvertent exposure of sensitive information. Rather than restricting AI adoption, the team wanted to give engineers the freedom to use new tools while maintaining control over where sensitive data could go. With Cato’s CASB, BWT Alpine Formula One Team get the granularity that the previous stack couldn’t provide: file sharing limited to specific functions, AI tools governed instead of blocked, and sensitive data protected in motion. “Cato allows us to open up more, while also having stricter controls in place,” said Mayhew. “Cato allows us to open up more, while also having stricter controls in place." Chris Mayhew, IT Infrastructure Manager Keeping Pace The 2026 season brought the biggest regulation reset in Formula One in years. BWT Alpine Formula One Team was ready for it. Trackside environments are operational before the rest of the team arrives. Data reaches engineers as the car moves between corners. Security enables without restricting. The team’s infrastructure isn't a constraint on ambition. It's a foundation for it. “We will never be finished,” said David. “It’s never going to be complete, and we have to keep reinventing ourselves and our technology.” [boxlink link="https://go.catonetworks.com/rs/245-RJK-441/images/Alpine_Formula_One_Team_Case_Study.pdf"] Download Case Study [/boxlink]

CIAL Dun & Bradstreet Improves Networking and Security in Latin American with Cato Summary: Formula One is decided at speed, on track and off it. For BWT Alpine Formula One Team, the network connecting trackside operations to the factory is key to on-track efficient delivery. It carries some of the most sensitive competitive data in sport and must be rebuilt at 25 circuits a year, often under intense time pressure. The team needed a network transformation built for speed, security, and constant change. Heading into 2026’s biggest regulation reset in years, BWT Alpine Formula One Team deployed the Cato SASE Platform, converging networking and security onto a single platform built for the pace of the sport. The result: trackside environments live in minutes, data reaching engineers in almost real time, and security that finally enables rather than restricts. Key Results Time to access race data cut from 20–30 minutes to seconds Trackside environment setup reduced from hours to minutes Device onboarding reduced from ~5 steps to 1 4+ legacy platforms consolidated into one centrally managed SASE platform The Environment That Demands Everything For most enterprises, networking and security are a balancing act. Bandwidth is weighed against cost, controls against usability, and inspection against latency. For BWT Alpine Formula One Team, that tradeoff does not exist. Performance is the business, and network or security failures are not abstract IT risks, they translate directly into competitive outcomes on track. “In Formula One, everything we do is driven by data,” said Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team. “Our role in IT is to make sure that data gets to the right people, at the right time, securely, without limiting creativity or innovation.” That mandate plays out in one of the most extreme digital environments in professional sport. The team’s entire on-track set-up moves roughly 25 times a year, following the Formula One calendar from continent to continent. “Every race weekend, we’re effectively standing up a temporary enterprise in a new country,” said David. “You have very limited time to get everything working, and absolutely no tolerance for gaps, operationally or from a security point of view.” "Every race weekend, we're effectively standing up a temporary enterprise in a new country."  Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team Each event generates up to 1.5TB of data over the course of the weekend, with live telemetry streaming at 8Mb per second per car. Real-time communication between trackside engineers and factory-based strategists is equally non-negotiable. For David and Chris Mayhew, the team’s IT Infrastructure Manager, that meant infrastructure that could be trusted completely. Simplicity, Performance, and Resiliency “2026 is a massive opportunity for us,” David said. “It’s a chance to transform our infrastructure and how we operate.” Formula One saw the biggest regulation reset in years in 2026. The team launched the A526: a completely new car from front to back, chassis to power unit. In terms of IT infrastructure, David said: “We need simplicity, performance, and resiliency at the heart of everything we do.” The existing fragmented stack couldn’t deliver it. There were four separate platforms, each with its own policy model and limited visibility: MPLS networking, a web proxy that capped trackside bandwidth to 100Mbps, a legacy VPN, and firewall. Any policy change had to be configured across each. Traffic routed through heavyweight tunnels added latency at every step. “We were creating barriers for people to really innovate with new technologies,” said David. Cato replaced all of it. “You’re able to achieve all of that on your own roadmap,” said Mayhew, “with much more ease and in a far shorter time than if you were to use a multitude of different vendors.” “It was a straightforward tick box in all of those areas,” said David. “We chose the technology because it met everything we needed to do.” The Right Start IT staff are among the first to arrive at every circuit. Their job is to establish the link to the Enstone factory (the team’s HQ in the United Kingdom) before the rest of the team walks in. Once that connection is live, engineers at the factory can begin working, even while hardware from the previous race is still in transit. “We work as one team,” said Paul Briggs, the team’s Senior Network Engineer. “There are colleagues trackside and in Enstone, all focused on the same goal.” Get behind at the start, and both sides are waiting. “Before, we may have been three or four hours behind getting our internet connectivity set up,” said Mayhew. “Now, it literally is: we have an internet connection in any form, and Cato will come up. I could probably send an engineer who has never been to track before, tell them where to plug a cable in, and we would see the service come up.” "I could probably send an engineer who has never been to track before, tell them where to plug a cable in, and we would see the service come up."  Chris Mayhew, IT Infrastructure Manager Behind that simplicity is Cato's edge device, the Cato Socket. The moment it has power, it finds the nearest of Cato's 100+ Points of Presence and brings the full environment up. “We’ve got confidence that the service will come up as it always does,” said Mayhew. “There is no fault resolution to do. Services are active almost from the moment you plug in.” That confidence holds through the race weekend. “Our biggest win with Cato is the ease of the SD-WAN,” said Mayhew. “We could have a loss of service for one of those internet connections, and we’ve got confidence that not only the connection would fail over, but all of the services that are using that connection would seamlessly fail over with it as well.” At one test event this season, the primary connection from a trackside ISP went down. Live telemetry, engineer communication, everything running on that connection was at risk. But Cato’s SD-WAN automatically switched to the secondary connection. Engineers at the track and Enstone kept working. No one noticed. Data When the Decision Has to Be Made The value of data in Formula One is measured in the time it takes to act on it. Trackside connections carry live telemetry from both cars, real-time communication with Enstone, and data flowing through the third-party services that support race operations. Each one is a critical path. If a connection is slow, engineers wait. If it’s invisible, no one knows why. Before Cato, that invisibility was the reality. “You set it up, it functions,” Mayhew said, “but actually, what’s going across that connectivity, what’s happening? Trying to troubleshoot and fault-find these issues would have taken a lot more time to pinpoint what was happening.” Now every connection is observable end-to-end. Latency is tracked, bottlenecks visible, SaaS integrations consistent. And because networking and security run on the same platform, traffic never detours to a separate proxy for inspection. No blind spots between tools. No latency penalty for being secure. “Engineers can now get access to data that previously would have taken us 20, 30 minutes to retrieve,” said David. “Now, when the car is traveling between corners 2 and 3, the data is there immediately. It’s a real impact directly on track.” At most circuits, that’s under 30 seconds into any lap. “Now, when the car is traveling between corners 2 and 3, the data is there immediately. It’s a real impact directly on track.” Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team “It’s not just the performance when the platform’s running normally,” David said. “It’s how quickly we can get to those solutions. Cato SASE Platform makes us more agile as a team and more efficient, which ultimately increases the performance of the car.” Security Without Barriers Heading into 2026, one goal was non-negotiable: replace security controls that created friction with ones built for how the team actually operates. “Formula One engineers are some of the most intelligent people in the world. If there is a barrier in their way, they will find a way around it,” said David. “Our job is to make sure there are no barriers, just performance.” The foundation is visibility. “That single pane of glass is massive for us,” said Briggs. “We can see what’s connected, what it’s talking to, and whether that behavior is expected.” For a team that moves so frequently, the VPN was a constant friction point: slow, inconsistent, and over-permissive. Cato's Universal ZTNA replaced it with access that follows the engineer rather than the location. “Their laptop is an extension of the network,” said Mayhew. “Wherever they are, they’re able to access the services they need.” As BWT Alpine Formula One Team expands its use of SaaS platforms and AI-driven tools, new data-handling risks emerge, particularly around inadvertent exposure of sensitive information. Rather than restricting AI adoption, the team wanted to give engineers the freedom to use new tools while maintaining control over where sensitive data could go. With Cato’s CASB, BWT Alpine Formula One Team get the granularity that the previous stack couldn’t provide: file sharing limited to specific functions, AI tools governed instead of blocked, and sensitive data protected in motion. “Cato allows us to open up more, while also having stricter controls in place,” said Mayhew. “Cato allows us to open up more, while also having stricter controls in place." Chris Mayhew, IT Infrastructure Manager Keeping Pace The 2026 season brought the biggest regulation reset in Formula One in years. BWT Alpine Formula One Team was ready for it. Trackside environments are operational before the rest of the team arrives. Data reaches engineers as the car moves between corners. Security enables without restricting. The team’s infrastructure isn't a constraint on ambition. It's a foundation for it. “We will never be finished,” said David. “It’s never going to be complete, and we have to keep reinventing ourselves and our technology.” [boxlink link="https://go.catonetworks.com/rs/245-RJK-441/images/Alpine_Formula_One_Team_Case_Study.pdf"] Download Case Study [/boxlink]

Diamond Braces Uses Cato to Boost WAN Security, Performance, and Reliability Summary: Formula One is decided at speed, on track and off it. For BWT Alpine Formula One Team, the network connecting trackside operations to the factory is key to on-track efficient delivery. It carries some of the most sensitive competitive data in sport and must be rebuilt at 25 circuits a year, often under intense time pressure. The team needed a network transformation built for speed, security, and constant change. Heading into 2026’s biggest regulation reset in years, BWT Alpine Formula One Team deployed the Cato SASE Platform, converging networking and security onto a single platform built for the pace of the sport. The result: trackside environments live in minutes, data reaching engineers in almost real time, and security that finally enables rather than restricts. Key Results Time to access race data cut from 20–30 minutes to seconds Trackside environment setup reduced from hours to minutes Device onboarding reduced from ~5 steps to 1 4+ legacy platforms consolidated into one centrally managed SASE platform The Environment That Demands Everything For most enterprises, networking and security are a balancing act. Bandwidth is weighed against cost, controls against usability, and inspection against latency. For BWT Alpine Formula One Team, that tradeoff does not exist. Performance is the business, and network or security failures are not abstract IT risks, they translate directly into competitive outcomes on track. “In Formula One, everything we do is driven by data,” said Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team. “Our role in IT is to make sure that data gets to the right people, at the right time, securely, without limiting creativity or innovation.” That mandate plays out in one of the most extreme digital environments in professional sport. The team’s entire on-track set-up moves roughly 25 times a year, following the Formula One calendar from continent to continent. “Every race weekend, we’re effectively standing up a temporary enterprise in a new country,” said David. “You have very limited time to get everything working, and absolutely no tolerance for gaps, operationally or from a security point of view.” "Every race weekend, we're effectively standing up a temporary enterprise in a new country."  Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team Each event generates up to 1.5TB of data over the course of the weekend, with live telemetry streaming at 8Mb per second per car. Real-time communication between trackside engineers and factory-based strategists is equally non-negotiable. For David and Chris Mayhew, the team’s IT Infrastructure Manager, that meant infrastructure that could be trusted completely. Simplicity, Performance, and Resiliency “2026 is a massive opportunity for us,” David said. “It’s a chance to transform our infrastructure and how we operate.” Formula One saw the biggest regulation reset in years in 2026. The team launched the A526: a completely new car from front to back, chassis to power unit. In terms of IT infrastructure, David said: “We need simplicity, performance, and resiliency at the heart of everything we do.” The existing fragmented stack couldn’t deliver it. There were four separate platforms, each with its own policy model and limited visibility: MPLS networking, a web proxy that capped trackside bandwidth to 100Mbps, a legacy VPN, and firewall. Any policy change had to be configured across each. Traffic routed through heavyweight tunnels added latency at every step. “We were creating barriers for people to really innovate with new technologies,” said David. Cato replaced all of it. “You’re able to achieve all of that on your own roadmap,” said Mayhew, “with much more ease and in a far shorter time than if you were to use a multitude of different vendors.” “It was a straightforward tick box in all of those areas,” said David. “We chose the technology because it met everything we needed to do.” The Right Start IT staff are among the first to arrive at every circuit. Their job is to establish the link to the Enstone factory (the team’s HQ in the United Kingdom) before the rest of the team walks in. Once that connection is live, engineers at the factory can begin working, even while hardware from the previous race is still in transit. “We work as one team,” said Paul Briggs, the team’s Senior Network Engineer. “There are colleagues trackside and in Enstone, all focused on the same goal.” Get behind at the start, and both sides are waiting. “Before, we may have been three or four hours behind getting our internet connectivity set up,” said Mayhew. “Now, it literally is: we have an internet connection in any form, and Cato will come up. I could probably send an engineer who has never been to track before, tell them where to plug a cable in, and we would see the service come up.” "I could probably send an engineer who has never been to track before, tell them where to plug a cable in, and we would see the service come up."  Chris Mayhew, IT Infrastructure Manager Behind that simplicity is Cato's edge device, the Cato Socket. The moment it has power, it finds the nearest of Cato's 100+ Points of Presence and brings the full environment up. “We’ve got confidence that the service will come up as it always does,” said Mayhew. “There is no fault resolution to do. Services are active almost from the moment you plug in.” That confidence holds through the race weekend. “Our biggest win with Cato is the ease of the SD-WAN,” said Mayhew. “We could have a loss of service for one of those internet connections, and we’ve got confidence that not only the connection would fail over, but all of the services that are using that connection would seamlessly fail over with it as well.” At one test event this season, the primary connection from a trackside ISP went down. Live telemetry, engineer communication, everything running on that connection was at risk. But Cato’s SD-WAN automatically switched to the secondary connection. Engineers at the track and Enstone kept working. No one noticed. Data When the Decision Has to Be Made The value of data in Formula One is measured in the time it takes to act on it. Trackside connections carry live telemetry from both cars, real-time communication with Enstone, and data flowing through the third-party services that support race operations. Each one is a critical path. If a connection is slow, engineers wait. If it’s invisible, no one knows why. Before Cato, that invisibility was the reality. “You set it up, it functions,” Mayhew said, “but actually, what’s going across that connectivity, what’s happening? Trying to troubleshoot and fault-find these issues would have taken a lot more time to pinpoint what was happening.” Now every connection is observable end-to-end. Latency is tracked, bottlenecks visible, SaaS integrations consistent. And because networking and security run on the same platform, traffic never detours to a separate proxy for inspection. No blind spots between tools. No latency penalty for being secure. “Engineers can now get access to data that previously would have taken us 20, 30 minutes to retrieve,” said David. “Now, when the car is traveling between corners 2 and 3, the data is there immediately. It’s a real impact directly on track.” At most circuits, that’s under 30 seconds into any lap. “Now, when the car is traveling between corners 2 and 3, the data is there immediately. It’s a real impact directly on track.” Josh David, Head of IT, BWT Alpine Formula One Team “It’s not just the performance when the platform’s running normally,” David said. “It’s how quickly we can get to those solutions. Cato SASE Platform makes us more agile as a team and more efficient, which ultimately increases the performance of the car.” Security Without Barriers Heading into 2026, one goal was non-negotiable: replace security controls that created friction with ones built for how the team actually operates. “Formula One engineers are some of the most intelligent people in the world. If there is a barrier in their way, they will find a way around it,” said David. “Our job is to make sure there are no barriers, just performance.” The foundation is visibility. “That single pane of glass is massive for us,” said Briggs. “We can see what’s connected, what it’s talking to, and whether that behavior is expected.” For a team that moves so frequently, the VPN was a constant friction point: slow, inconsistent, and over-permissive. Cato's Universal ZTNA replaced it with access that follows the engineer rather than the location. “Their laptop is an extension of the network,” said Mayhew. “Wherever they are, they’re able to access the services they need.” As BWT Alpine Formula One Team expands its use of SaaS platforms and AI-driven tools, new data-handling risks emerge, particularly around inadvertent exposure of sensitive information. Rather than restricting AI adoption, the team wanted to give engineers the freedom to use new tools while maintaining control over where sensitive data could go. With Cato’s CASB, BWT Alpine Formula One Team get the granularity that the previous stack couldn’t provide: file sharing limited to specific functions, AI tools governed instead of blocked, and sensitive data protected in motion. “Cato allows us to open up more, while also having stricter controls in place,” said Mayhew. “Cato allows us to open up more, while also having stricter controls in place." Chris Mayhew, IT Infrastructure Manager Keeping Pace The 2026 season brought the biggest regulation reset in Formula One in years. BWT Alpine Formula One Team was ready for it. Trackside environments are operational before the rest of the team arrives. Data reaches engineers as the car moves between corners. Security enables without restricting. The team’s infrastructure isn't a constraint on ambition. It's a foundation for it. “We will never be finished,” said David. “It’s never going to be complete, and we have to keep reinventing ourselves and our technology.” [boxlink link="https://go.catonetworks.com/rs/245-RJK-441/images/Alpine_Formula_One_Team_Case_Study.pdf"] Download Case Study [/boxlink]