Category: Cato Networks

[By Demetris Booth, Product Manager, Cato Networks]

The cybersecurity market is brimming with point solutions. Each solution is designed to address a specific risk, a specific security use case and a specific attack vector. This approach is no longer sustainable because it unnecessarily complicates the overall security architecture. Security gaps are the result. Already overburdened and understaffed security teams are having to learn, configure, manage, maintain and monitor scores of different tools, and because of this, they are ignoring important alerts, delaying patching and overlooking other critical issues. Moreover, critical security signals simply get lost or buried across multiple and disparate systems, and these security gaps are being weaponized by cybercriminals.

XDR Addresses Security Complexity To A Degree

Extended detection and response (XDR) is being hailed as the “Swiss-army knife” solution to security complexity issues. For those not familiar with XDR, it is an advanced security technology that extends beyond endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools. XDR platforms analyze threats and anomalies across networks, endpoints, clouds, and more.

XDR technology sounds great on paper. There’s been considerable hype and confusion through clever marketing, as some XDR platforms only work on specific vendor toolsets (closed XDR or native XDR), while others promise integrations with third-party vendors (a.k.a. Open XDR). The issue is that the effectiveness of these integrations remains questionable. While Open XDR offers integration with existing networking and security tools, making sense of all this data can be challenging. This is because for XDR to process and analyze all threat data, it needs to be standardized into a format that the XDR tool understands.

Given this potential data inconsistency, it seems unlikely that XDR can live up to the hype and perform at a high degree of speed, effectiveness, and accuracy.

SASE-based XDR Can Overcome The Data Normalization Problem

Before we discuss SASE-based XDR, it is important to understand the basics behind Secure Access Service Edge. SASE converges networking and network security functions into a single, cloud-delivered architecture. SASE provides end-to-end visibility to ensure consistent global policy enforcement for all authorized users, devices and applications regardless of location.

What Is SASE-based XDR And How Does It Work? 

SASE-based XDR is a new native approach to detection and response that improves operations for security teams. Unlike standard XDR technology that relies on capturing threat data from multiple security tools, SASE-based XDR captures threat data from native sensors that are built into the SASE platform, as well as data from third-party sensors. Data from these sensors is populated into a single data lake and requires no integration or normalization. Advanced AI/ML algorithms train on this data to produce more accurate and related threat incidents for security analysts to act on.

SASE-based XDR becomes a game changer over standard XDR because of the quality of data it produces. As mentioned earlier, standard XDR has data quality limitations, which can impact detection and response effectiveness. Because XDR requires security data to be normalized and understood, it risks losing critical threat information during the process. The quality of the data and the accuracy of security incidents that security analysts handle are directly affected by this.

With SASE in the picture, XDR is more effective because it ingests cleaner data to produce more accurate security incidents. Furthermore, training AI/ML on higher-quality data ensures enhanced threat correlation, detection, and incident response capabilities.

Studies show that most organizations are gravitating to technologies like XDR and SASE in a bid to consolidate security and reduce overhead and complexity. Given the challenges and limitations of standard XDR, it makes reasonable sense to evaluate SASE based XDR, which leverages the best of both worlds to deliver superior visibility and control.

About the Author 

Demetris Booth is Product Director for Cato Networks in Asia Pacific, Demetris leads the strategic engagements around Cato’s cloud-native approach to Secure Access Service Edge (SASE). He is a strong advocate and champion of network and security convergence, promoting SASE as the pathway to better business and technical outcomes. Prior to Cato, he held various leadership roles with Sophos, Cisco, Juniper Networks and Citrix Systems. As a 20+ year technology industry veteran, he brings a diverse, global perspective, having lived and worked in North America, Europe, and Asia.

The post How SASE-based XDR Delivers Better Threat Detection Performance appeared first on Cybersecurity Insiders.

Cato Networks, the world’s leading single-vendor SASE platform provider,  has announced it has grown its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from $1 million to $100 million in just five years. This best-in-class performance for enterprise network security compares with LinkedIn and faster than consumer-oriented brands, such as Twilio, Wix, Zapier, Canva, and Shopify.  

Like these companies, Cato was the first to bring a born-for-the-cloud architecture to disrupt its category. Since its founding in 2015, Cato’s vision has been of a single, global platform to converge enterprise networking and networking security in the cloud, a vision that was adopted in 2019 by Gartner in the SASE framework and more recently the market guide for Single-Vendor SASE. To date, Cato SASE Cloud has been adopted by 1,500+ enterprise customers spanning 23,000+ branch locations and cloud instances and 450,000+ remote users across 150+ countries. 

“Cato is leading the biggest disruption of the networking and network security markets since the introduction of the next-generation firewall 17 years ago,” says Alon Alter, Chief Revenue Officer at Cato Networks. “The simplicity, agility, visibility, and control of the Cato SASE Cloud brings world-class security protection and optimal network performance to businesses of all sizes. Driven by security and networking experts, Cato has the right service DNA and technology to become the mission-critical platform for the digital enterprise.” 

“With Cato, we got the speed of a Porsche with all of the capabilities and costs of a sedan. Cato improved our ability to collaborate with one another, enabled our worldwide telecommunications cost reductions by 15 to 20 percent, while enhancing our security posture,” says Rodney Masney, chief information officer at O-I Glass, a $6.4B producer of glass bottles and jars worldwide. O-I Glass has nearly 200 locations today on Cato, servicing some 24,000 people across 19 countries. “Cato is transforming our ability to connect to our network in a different and meaningful way with respect to mobile work, working from home, better throughput and performance, and a higher level of security.” 

Time Required for Cloud-native Startups to Reach $100M ARR 

Cato reached $100M ARR in just five years, record time for enterprise networking security. (Source: Cato and Bessemer Venture Partners)

Born-in-the Cloud, Cato Networks Revolutionises Networking and Security 

Achieving $100 million in ARR, the so-called Centaur status, is seen as a better predictor of business success than becoming a Unicorn, which Cato achieved in 2020.  

Like other Centaurs, Cato’s remarkable growth was propelled by revolutionising its industry, introducing the first and most mature single-vendor SASE solution. Until Cato, enterprise IT teams suffered the costs, complexity, and risks of networks built from discrete, specialised security and networking appliances. With the Cato Single Pass Cloud Engine (SPACE) architecture, Cato showed how replacing appliances with a single-vendor SASE platform could transform enterprise IT infrastructure.  

“At the end of the day, we needed a way to support our 50 locations and 20,000 remote users with a solution that was simple, allowed us to co-manage because we like to maintain control, and with a dev ops approach within IT of whoever builds and runs it,” says Joel Jacobson, Global WAN Manager at Vitesco Technologies, an international leader in intelligent and electrified drive systems for sustainable mobility. “Cato allowed us the flexibility to incorporate our WAN, Internet, and remote access solutions into one neat package that could be managed with a small team of people. There was no other package out there quite like it.” 

Cato: The Gold Standard for Single-Vendor SASE Platforms  

Cato’s transformation of networking and security into a converged cloud architecture led to the industry realignment of SASE.  

The percentage of new single-vendor SASE deployments is expected to more than triple in the next three years. According to Gartner, “By 2025, one-third of new SASE deployments will be based on a single-vendor SASE offering, up from 10% in 2022.” At the same time, Gartner expects that the SASE market will grow at a CAGR of 35.8%, reaching almost $21 billion by 2026.1 

This architectural shift is the unsung story of SASE. The cloudification and convergence of networking and security brought cloud agility and economics to bear on IT infrastructure. It is this architectural change that allows massive operational IT improvements and efficiencies and leads, as Gartner noted, to improved security posture, network and staff security efficacy, and user and administrator experience2. Integrating appliances together may share similar features as a single-vendor SASE solution but will lack the cloud’s benefits. 

“Cato’s strength is the ability to provide a SASE solution as a full package,” says Toru Maruta, an executive officer and head of product management at KDDI. “Since the start of COVID-19, hybrid work has spread rapidly, and security solutions including SASE have become enablers for this. Hybrid work is achieved through the combination of various components including local breakout with SD-WANs, remote access with SSEs, and endpoint protection with EDR. However, combining and smoothly managing a variety of components is a large pain point for corporate IT managers. Cato’s full package makes it easy to combine and manage such services, and it has won the approval of many customers. The partnership between KDDI, with its long years of experience providing and operating network services, and Cato, with its full package SASE solution, represents the optimal solution for corporate IT environments that aim to accelerate their digital transformation.” 

Cloud delivery and convergence of capabilities are transforming IT. Cato is a driving force behind that trend in networking and security — and we have only just begun our journey. Whether a company is in the Fortune 500 or 500-employees, all can be connected and secured by the Cato SASE Cloud.  

For more information about Cato and Cato SASE Cloud, visit us at www.catonetworks.com 

  1. Gartner, Market Guide for Single-Vendor SASE, Neil MacDonald, John Watts, Jonathan Forest, and Andrew Lerner, 28 September 2022 
  2. Gartner, Market Guide for Forecast Analysis: Secure Access Service Edge, Worldwide, Nat Smith, Neil MacDonald, Andrew Lerner, Jonathan Forest, John Watts, and Christian Canales, 21 October 2022 

 

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