Cato Networks

More About Cato Networks

Cato Networks focuses on delivering a SASE (networking and security) platform that combines wide area networking with network security functions delivered from a global cloud-native infrastructure.

The company’s offering is positioned for enterprises that need to connect branch sites, data centers, cloud environments, and remote or hybrid users to applications while applying consistent security controls and traffic optimization.

The Cato platform (SASE) typically includes software-defined wide area networking capabilities (SD-WAN) (networking) for link aggregation, path selection, and traffic steering, combined with cloud-delivered security services such as secure web access, firewalling, and threat inspection.

Enterprise customers use Cato’s global private backbone (networking) to route traffic through Cato-owned or managed Points of Presence (PoP) rather than traversing the public internet end to end, with the intent to manage latency, jitter, and packet loss in a more predictable manner than traditional site-to-site Virtual Private Network (VPN) architectures.

The service is delivered as a managed cloud platform, where customer sites typically connect via edge appliances or software clients, and traffic is then forwarded to the nearest Cato point of presence for policy enforcement and routing.

From a security architecture perspective, Cato’s offering aligns with zero trust network access (ZTNA) (security) principles for user and device access to applications, and with Secure Web Gateway (SWG) and Next-Generation Firewall (NGFW) concepts (security) for inspection of web and non-web traffic.

Policies for access control, traffic routing, and threat protection are centrally configured and enforced across branch offices, data centers, Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) environments, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) usage, which is intended to replace separate stacks of Wide Area Network (WAN) optimization, VPN concentrators, and hardware firewalls in distributed environments.

In marketplace taxonomies, Cato Networks fits into SASE (networking and security), software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) (networking), zero trust network access (ZTNA) (security), and cloud-delivered network security (security-as-a-service) categories.

Enterprises adopting Cato typically evaluate it alongside other SASE and SD-WAN providers when consolidating networking and security, especially where there is a transition from MPLS-based WANs to internet-centric connectivity models and from appliance-centric security deployments to cloud-delivered services.