Cato Networks SASE/SD-WAN Demo and Review | Built for Teamwork

Your company is in the market for a SASE solution and you keep hearing about Cato Networks, but you are wondering what actually makes their solution different from the dozen other SASE vendors claiming to do the same thing.
In this video, I give you my full review of Cato Networks’ SASE solution, demo their Orchestrator customer portal, and tell you exactly when Cato is a great fit for your organization and when it may not be.
Want a demo and quote on Cato Networks for your company? Ask me today.

About Me

Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks.

Transcript

If you would like more information on Cato Networks for your company, send me an email or give me a call at 714.593.0011. Do not contact Cato directly. I will introduce you to my team at Cato Networks, run by Lisa, who I have known for over 25 years. This is the team you want to work with. You will also get better pricing going through me than reaching out to Cato on your own. I am a broker for all the major SASE and cloud phone system solutions in the marketplace, I have been doing this for over 20 years, and the service providers pay my broker fee, so it costs your company nothing. Join the thousands of other companies who have used me to help their company make a better decision in a fraction of the time. Also do not forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel and go check out AeroComInc.com where you can read and write reviews on providers, watch videos, and filter by features.

Two Overarching Advantages That Shape Everything Cato Does

Before getting into specific products, there are two foundational attributes of Cato’s solution that show up repeatedly throughout their platform.

Built Organically From the Ground Up

Cato Networks is almost entirely a homegrown solution. They grew through organic development rather than acquisition. Most SASE vendors in the market today started as an on premise firewall solution and grew into SASE by acquiring separate companies, an SD-WAN provider here, a ZTNA company there, maybe an AI security company. Those acquired pieces are technically part of a SASE solution, but they often do not fully talk to each other.

Cato built everything in house from day one with the explicit intent for every component to interoperate. That gives them three real advantages. First, complete lateral visibility: the SD-WAN, SSE, ZTNA, and AI security products can all see each other, so a threat that enters through one part of the network can be traced across the entire story rather than in isolated silos. Second, a true single pass architecture, meaning traffic does not get repeatedly encrypted and decrypted as it moves between separate applications, which lowers latency and increases security. Third, everything lives inside one customer portal, which saves your IT team real time since they are not jumping between multiple disconnected applications trying to piece together what happened.

One Hundred Percent Cloud Based

Every security decision and policy enforcement action happens in the cloud with Cato, not on premise. Cato does offer a physical appliance called a socket that can be deployed at a site, but it functions only as a simple device that forwards your traffic to Cato’s SD-WAN network. Because everything runs in the cloud, a new site can be turned up with Cato in about three minutes, which is dramatically faster than most on premise based SASE solutions on the market. There is one tradeoff to this approach that I will cover later in the review.

Their SD-WAN Solution: Managed From a Single Cloud Portal

Cato’s management solution, called the customer dashboard or Orchestrator, gives you a full visual topology of your network. Sites appear on the outside with Cato’s private backbone represented in the middle. You can click into any site to see how it connects, whether through a virtual socket in a cloud environment or a physical on premise appliance, and see which Cato point of presence it routes through.

The network section lets you control your entire WAN from one place since everything runs in the cloud. You can view site performance metrics like link speed, jitter, and last mile packet loss. App analytics break down every application running on your network by category and user, and a priority analyzer shows how applications are classified and prioritized. The events section functions as a full log of everything happening across both the network and security side, down to specific user activity, which supports genuinely useful correlation between network and security events on a single platform.

Network routing rules let you control exactly how specific traffic routes through specific locations. Cato also provides dedicated public IP addresses you can assign to specific cloud applications, giving you control over exactly where your inbound and outbound traffic lives.

Cato’s Private Global Backbone

Cato owns and operates their own global self healing private backbone with more than 100 points of presence worldwide, and they add new points of presence roughly every month. Most SASE and SD-WAN vendors either do not offer a backbone at all or lease one from other ISPs. Owning the backbone gives Cato three specific advantages.

First, it effectively converts wide area network traffic into something closer to local area network performance, controlling latency, packet loss, and jitter in a way the public internet cannot. This matters significantly for global companies, especially those with a location in China, since Cato’s backbone can route around the public internet entirely.

Second, owning the backbone gives Cato much deeper security visibility than a vendor leasing circuits from someone else, since they can see everything happening across the network they operate directly.

Third, it gives Cato direct control over network uptime, which is why they can offer a 99.999 percent SLA.

The tradeoff is cost. Owning and maintaining a global private backbone is expensive, and that typically makes Cato’s solution a bit pricier than SASE vendors that do not operate their own backbone. It is not an apples to apples comparison, but it is a fair tradeoff to be aware of.

Cato’s Security Platform

Cato’s secure service edge platform includes firewall as a service, agentic threat protection, secure web gateway, intrusion prevention, malware prevention, DNS security, remote browser isolation, IoT security, cloud access security broker, and data loss prevention. Each of these is solid on its own, but the real value is that Cato built them from the ground up to communicate with every other part of their SASE platform.

The threats dashboard gives you a global visual view of any threats across your entire organization. The internet firewall lets you build a rule and publish it to every global point of presence in your network within about two minutes, without ever touching an on site appliance.

One of Cato’s newest capabilities is agentic threat protection, which uses Cato’s own AI agents to detect and shut down threatening behavior in real time, even from a compromised account using valid credentials. If a user’s account starts accessing applications or tools it never normally touches, like PowerShell or admin level tools outside their role, Cato’s agentic threat protection can shut that user down immediately. This capability cross references data from the SD-WAN, SSE, ZTNA, and AI security products simultaneously, which again comes back to the advantage of everything being built organically to interoperate from day one.

Remote Access and ZTNA

Cato’s remote access solution covers users, user groups, protected endpoints, directory services, and authentication, including easy integration with existing single sign on providers like Azure. Every user gets a simple always on remote access client that automatically connects to the nearest Cato point of presence, keeping that last mile connection optimized no matter where the user is located. If a remote user walks into an office with a physical Cato socket installed, the client automatically switches to office mode to avoid creating redundant tunnels.

Cato also lets you create a secure browser access link for a contractor or outside party, tied to specific applications with full visibility and authentication, without needing the full Cato client installed. An enterprise browser option is also available that intercepts all traffic, including AI application traffic, and ties it laterally into the SD-WAN, SSE, and AI security products.

Cato’s AI Security Platform

Cato’s most recent innovation is their AI security platform, built to help IT departments get a handle on both AI applications their users access and any homegrown AI agents built within the company. The discovery section shows every AI application running on your network along with its risk category and usage details. You can build engine profiles to prevent users from pasting sensitive information, like PII or network details, into tools like ChatGPT, and Cato can detect code sharing across virtually any programming language.

Cato can also manage interactions between a company’s own homegrown AI agent and a backend model like Anthropic’s, validating or scrubbing traffic and enforcing policy guards on that interaction. The session explorer lets you dig into a specific interaction to see the topic, intent, and any violations, and you can reveal the full session to see exactly what was typed into the AI model, all logged and tightly access controlled. Cato can also detect agentic AI operating autonomously on your network, even if an employee deployed it accidentally without full awareness, and give you visibility and control over it.

When Is Cato a Good Fit for Your Company?

Cato’s four product categories, SD-WAN, SSE, ZTNA remote access, and AI security, can be purchased individually or together. Purchased standalone, none of them are necessarily the most groundbreaking product in their category on their own. Cato becomes a strong fit when your company sees long term value in consolidating multiple solutions under a single vendor over time, even if you are only purchasing one category today.

Cato is also a unique fit if your company has multiple sites with latency or packet loss sensitive traffic, especially global sites or a location in China, where Cato’s private backbone provides a real advantage.

Finally, Cato is a strong fit if your company has many sites or remote users nationally or globally without much technical expertise on site, since Cato’s cloud based, plug and play deployment model (either the remote client or the simple socket appliance) makes managing a complex network possible without local IT staff.

When Might Cato Not Be the Right Fit?

Because Cato is 100 percent cloud based, they cannot manage split tunneling for you. If your company recently invested in your own firewalls, like Palo Alto, and still has years left on that contract, and you want to run large amounts of public internet traffic directly through those firewalls while only sending WAN traffic to Cato, that split tunneling setup has to be managed entirely on your own. Cato will put all of that bandwidth through their socket and bill you for the full circuit unless you manage the split yourself with your own firewall placed in front of the Cato device, which requires real technical capability on site at every location.

Want a Demo and Quote on Cato Networks?

Send me an email or give me a call at 714.593.0011. I represent all the major SASE solutions in the marketplace and can help you determine whether Cato is the right fit for your specific requirements. When you reach out, you will be working with my hand selected team at Cato, the best team there is to work with at that company, and I will get you better pricing than contacting them directly. If you want to compare Cato against their competitors, I can make those introductions too. I do not charge your company anything. Join the thousands of other companies who have used me to help their company make a better decision in a fraction of the time. Do not forget to subscribe to the YouTube channel and check out AeroComInc.com. Thanks for watching. I will catch you on the next one.