Cato Networks SASE SD-WAN Review 2025

Your company is in the market for a SASE SD-WAN Solution, and you’ve heard of Cato Networks. What’s the inside scoop on them? What’s good? What’s not so good?

In this video, I review everything you need to know about Cato Networks, including architecture, features, pricing, and more.

Want a demo or quote from Cato and their top competitors? 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

Your company is in the market for a SASE SD-WAN solution. And you’ve heard of this company called Cato Networks. And you want to know, hey, what’s the scoop on them? What’s the good, the bad and the ugly? Well, my name is Mike Smith. I’m the president of Aerocom let’s put our heads together on this.

My Recommendations

But before we get ahead of ourselves, hey, as we’re talking about Cato. If you’d like a full demo on Cato and a quote on Cato and to work with their best salesperson over there and maybe take a look at some of the competitors that I’d recommend you compare Cato to, reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I will help your company make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I know the landscape of all the competitors out there and my broker services are completely free to use. There is no excuse not to at least reach out and see what I have to say. So give me a call.Send me an email. I’d love to help you on this project. It’s the reason why I do these videos. And if you’ve got something from the video, it’s a nice way to say thank you. Also, don’t forget to go to our website site com income and take a look. I guarantee you’ve never seen a website like it. There’s a lot of cool stuff on service providers, reviews. Go take a look. And as always, don’t forget to hit the subscribe button so you don’t miss any of my weekly videos that I put out.

Two Perfect-Fit Use Cases for Cato Networks

All right. Well, I’m going to give you the best stuff right out of the gate in this video. I’m going to give you two of the most common best scenarios where keto is a great fit, where Cato should be one of the final companies that you’re evaluating. Number one, your company has multiple sites, especially if they’re global and you’re trying to reduce packet loss or latency on your wide area network. So that’s scenario number one. In that scenario, keto is a pretty good fit.

And then scenario number two, your company has mission critical onsite servers that are being accessed from people outside of the organization. All right. So those are the two scenarios that make keto a pretty darn good fit and they should probably be one of the last vendors you’re evaluating. Obviously there’s other factors and we’re going to talk about that in a minute. And there’s other competitors involved too. Again, if you want to know who those are, reach out and contact me. But those two scenarios are really good fit for keto.

Cato Networks Architecture

All right, now let’s get into the details. What’s Cato’s architecture? Well, they’re what I call a cloud enabled SD when SASE solution that has global points of presence pops and those global pops are connected by a private IT fiber optic backbone network, Cato can do either just plain old SD WAN like that’s what came out in probably 2006 or so or they can do SASE solutions and they can also do CASB solutions and it’s an optics solution. So we’re talking about operating expenses. So it’s a monthly charge that you get from Cato. It’s not a large upfront fee. So that makes a nice it’s very easy to deploy, very inexpensive to deploy compared to having to purchase a lot of stuff upfront.

What I like about Cato Networks

Now I’m going to run you through some of the things I really like about Cato.

Number one is they pretty much got all the SD-WAN features that your company could ever need. So for instance, they can do traffic shaping BI directionally. They can do load balancing and fail over by directionally and by BI directionally. I’ve said that a couple of times. I mean your outbound internet traffic and your incoming internet traffic, your ingress and egress, they can do both load balancing, traffic shaping and failover for both. They can also do packet duplication. I know that’s a controversial, controversial topic, but they can do packet duplication over multiple circuits. They can also do VoIP session reassignment, meaning that if you’re on a VoIP call and that’s going over one of your Internet circuits, if that Internet circuit goes down, they can switch that call to the other ISP circuit without the call ever dropping. And they can also the application and when monitoring. So you can you can monitor the quality of your applications and your win environment through their solution. So those are all the cool sd-wan features they can do. But what I also like about Cato is their SASE solution. So back in the day, what I used to call this is just an SD-WAN solution with managed Next-Gen secured, but now that has become the term SASE.

SASE & CASB

So Cato has been doing this since its inception and they have a full SASE solution. So not just firewall, but they’re also providing things like antivirus and content, filtering all the next gen security products. And to go a step further, they’re also a CASB service provider. So if you don’t know what that is, you can watch my video on what CASB service provider is. And if I’m talking about the things that I like about Cato Networks, I definitely have to list on there that they’re extremely user friendly.

User Friendly & Always Innovating

That’s something that almost every single customer that I’ve introduced to Cato and has demoed Cato says, is that their platform is just really easy to use. It’s just nice and simple, very user friendly. They’ve got a lot of features and cool things about it, but the interface is just very simple and easy to use, not complicated at all.

Another thing that I like about Cato is that they’re always innovating. They’re growing quite a bit and they’re really reinvesting and doing a lot of R&D into their product. And so they’re always innovating. They’re always coming out with new things, which is really cool.

Digital Experience Monitoring

And one of the coolest things that I definitely want you to know about, about Cato Networks is their digital experience monitoring. This is a really cool feature and it’s only like $2 per month per user to add on. What this does is that it allows I.T. departments of in the case of troubleshooting, if one of your users calls in and says they’re having some issues connecting to a certain application, what Cato Networks tool does is it will it has the ability to see to that user’s computer that user’s wi fi access point, their cable modem, the Internet connection, the pop that it’s connecting to the network of the ISP and Cato Network’s backbone as well.

So it’s really able to see the whole thing. And then each one of those categories, as you know, and I should say the application itself. So each one of those categories gets either green, yellow or red. So all the IT department has to do is pull up this software and really quickly, the only thing that’s yellow or red on there, they’re going to be able to see like that. And that’s the problem. So everything is going to be green except for one thing, typically, and that’s where the problem is. So it’s seeing the whole thing from all the way from the the computer that the user is sitting on to the application, to the access point, to the modem, to the Internet, connection to the pop and Cato’s network, and be able to see the whole thing and see like, okay, this is where the problem lies.

Global POPS & Free Trial

I also love that they have global points of presence and they have a fiber optic backbone that’s connecting those pops. And what that leads to is their ability to do TCP proxy over their global backbone. If you don’t know what TCP proxy is, again, I have another video on that you can watch as well.

And finally, I love the fact that they offer a free trial. I’ve been on so many phone calls with customers where they present the SD-WAN solution or the vendor, I should say, presents the SD one solution. But on the Cato calls, they’re willing to take the next step where they’ll actually set up a free trial to let the customer actually test all those great things that they’ve been talking about. So I think that’s really cool.

What Do I Not Like About Cato Networks

But what do I not like about Cato? What do I think? Cato doesn’t do that well at Well, Cato Networks pricing to me is a little bit expensive if your company has large bandwidth needs. And by that I mean the way Cato Networks prices things is by bandwidth. So the more bandwidth, total aggregated throughput you want to put through the Cato solution, the more expensive that Cato solution costs per month. And so what that leads to is say you have a small site that has a gig, cable, Internet connection, very, very common because cable Internet so inexpensive, a lot of times companies will get a gig download and they’ll have like say 300 megs upload. Well, that gets pretty expensive with Cato to get a gig throughput through their solution. So what ends up happening is you have to end up, you know, maybe getting like a 300 meg solution. Shen and you’re bottlenecking that Internet connection that you have. So you’re not really able to to really fully use the large Internet connections that you have. You really have to boil it down to, okay, what do we typically use on a daily basis? So that would be my one gripe about cable networks is that they get expensive for high bandwidth. So therefore, a lot of times companies are having to bottleneck their larger Internet connections in order to make the solution affordable. So that’s the one thing I do have a little bit of gripe with them about. But other than that, obviously, as you heard, there’s a lot of really good things about Cato. that’s my video on Cato.

Still confused? Reach out and contact me

That’s my review on him. Really like him as a vendor. I think they do a great job. And again, if you’d like me to give you a demo on Cato, get you a quote on Cato, don’t call Cato directly. Actually, just reach out and contact me. So I want you do see to the best person you should be working with over there. Also oversee the whole process to make sure you get the demo and the quote that you’re looking for. There are also introduce you to some additional competitors to Cato that I think you should be looking at as well and just reach out, send me an email or give me a call (714.593.0011). I’d love to help you with this. I’ve been doing this for over 20 years. I’m a broker for all the major SD-WAN and SASE vendors out there. So based on your company’s requirements, I can make sure you’re going to be talking to the right vendors. I will definitely help your company make a lot better decision in a fraction of the time. The nice thing is, on top of all that, I don’t charge you anything for my broker services. The service providers like Cato, they actually pay me to help bring them new customers so your company doesn’t have to pay me anything. So there’s no excuse not to at least reach out and get my opinion on the vendors you should be looking at. So definitely send me an email, give me a call. I’d love to help you.

Thanks for watching and have a great day.