A closer look at Cato Networks’ SASE platform
Like most SD-WAN-based solutions, Cato’s platform works at the edge of the network, where the LAN connects to the public internet, to access cloud or other services. As with other SD-WAN offerings, the edge must connect to something beyond the four walls of the private network. In Cato’s case, the company has created a global, geographically distributed private backbone, which is connected via multiple network providers. In essence, Cato has built a private cloud that can be reached over the public internet.
That global private backbone incorporates the elements of SASE and brings forth fully converged networking and security to each edge connection. Cato makes that possible with the Cato Socket, Cato’s SD-WAN device. The Socket is a physical appliance (or virtual one for the cloud) that routes all traffic from the edge to the closest cato PoP (Point of Presence). There are more than 50 cato PoPs, and those POPs share the data-center footprint of the major cloud providers, meaning that not only is there a Cato POP close to all major business centers worldwide, but that latency from Cato to your cloud provider is likely to be nominal at most. Cato’s global routing optimization significantly reduces latency when compared with the public Internet. Throughput is also improved by the WAN optimization built-into the Cato software.
With the core security and networking processing occurring in the Cato Cloud, the Cato Socket brings enough networking capabilities to overcome last-mile issues and bring the traffic into the nearest Cato PoP. The device implements QoS prioritization, which can be driven by applications, users and other definable elements. The Socket also institutes other traffic management capabilities, such as dynamic path selection and the ability to connect to a mix of fiber, cable, XDSL, 4G/LTE and MPLS connections.