Cato SASE Cloud Platform Reviews

The optimization and acceleration of traffic from difficult countries like China, India and South America are very valuable. Cato Networks is highly likely to win the deal if the customer has branch sites in countries with complex connections. On the other hand, if the customer has many difficulties, they may prefer other well-known solutions they already have installed.

In addition, we appreciate the optimization and acceleration of the performance of SDP users, especially those who work from home. The possibility of activating the IPS/TLS inspection without changing the device is also great.

The different languages in the user interface should be enhanced to include other languages. Currently, it's only in English, which would be an advantage in Italian for some small customers.

We have been using this solution for two years.

The solution is scalable because the possibility to scale depends mainly on the PoP. The PoP has no limitation in scalability, and there are two kinds of sockets. Still, there are a lot of differences in the suggested maximum throughput. One socket for under 500 megabits and the largest one has more slots for NICs. But the scalability doesn't depend on the appliance, it depends on the PoP.

For example, if you have 50 SDP users for people that connect remote to the headquarters, you can scale to 300 because all the staff works remotely. You won't need any updates, only the licenses in Cato, because the PoP can support it. This is different if you have a VPN based on the appliance because you usually have to update.

The technical support team is very good. We used them for deployment and initial settings. After that, it wasn't problematic. They can also advise you about the configuration if you change something during the time.

The setup is very easy. You can also define the policies and all the configurations without the need to have the socket already available. For example, with the customer, we configured all the settings and sent the socket to the branch in China. When the socket arrived, they only needed to turn it on and connect to the internet.

We are satisfied with the pricing. However, I don't know what the competition is on the price. It is also convenient because if you dismiss the MPLS connection, you save a lot of money, but it depends on the customer's network and their advantage.

I rate the solution a ten out of ten. The solution is good but can be improved by including different language options in the user interface.

We use the tool in our backend and offer it to our customers; we have a lot of customers interested in using the solution, including BPOs international MPLS lines replacement, banking, and finance branch to DC, and telecommunications companies. 

Cato is usually a cloud-native platform. However, it can be integrated into sites using sockets or by integrating the existing firewalls or routers with IPsec. The tool is flexible and has a powerful management User interface

When we hit the pandemic, it became challenging to migrate us and customers to have an auto-scaling VPN for the remote user. Cato gave us much hope because it works as fast as we need. It also helps our customers replace MPLS lines, or simply interconnect branch HQ and Cloud using its SASE. It stands out against other brands, which is why I highly rate it. 

• Competitive Cost with great features

• Full cloud native SASE with very skilled and responsive technical support

• The UI is accessible and user-friendly

• Integration was very straightforward

• My customer saves millions of pesos when we remove the line dependency for MPLS/IPVPN for domestic and international sites.
  

When I first encountered Cato, I didn't know how to use it, but after a week of training, I could onboard our systems to it, so the solution was easy to learn and navigate.

A little tweaking or improvement of the UI in terms of logging when troubleshooting. Overall the UI is perfect and very powerful. It will remove your stress when you came from silo solutions and old-school multi-branch connectivity.

Extra plugs via API would be a welcome feature, as the solution is a closed loop. Readily available external integration points would make our job easier for customers looking to integrate monitoring tools.

We have been working with the solution for about two years. 

The solution's stability is excellent; we didn't encounter any issues in a year. Cato Networks had a massive outage in 2017 or 2018, but they fixed it.

The solution is highly scalable because Cato Networks has its fully-fledged cloud and independent infrastructure. This is an advantage over other solutions dependent on AWS, for example, because a small business migrating to enterprise-level could be required to shut down its system for the upgrade. However, with Cato, it's much easier to scale up and down. I recently worked with a call center and was able to increase their capacity as they requested, which is very helpful in the IT industry.

We have 15 users in our company, and our largest deployment for a client is 22,000.

The technical support is very hands-on, even during the deployment process. They are skilled at helping their customers, so I rate them highly. As a dev, I didn't have to do anything, Cato took care of it, and I don't have any negative feedback for them. Our customers and we are delighted.

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. 

The product is very competitively priced, and that's compelling. They don't charge the customer based on the operational cost like other brands such as Palo Alto. Cato has its own fully-fledged cloud, with their own data centers, equipment, and so on, which is an advantage. I rate the solution five out of five for affordability. 

I compared many solutions because I received an initiative to find one to fit into our market. I asked the industry leaders for POCs, and Cato stood out because of their platform; they were the first in the SASE domain.

I rate the solution nine out of ten. 

If we require remote site deployment, for example, if we have applications sitting in an on-premise data center, there are two ways of doing that. We need an IPsec channel going from the data center to Cato Cloud, and the first way of doing that is using the existing network component, either router or fiber, as long as they have IPsec. Second, we can use Cato Network's sockets if we want visibility, packet loss monitoring, the SD-WAN component, etc.

Cato Networks is an excellent solution in the retail sector, especially for companies with multiple sites or international branches, like Jollibee. The product is less applicable for a telco because it can conflict with the consumer-facing side of the operation. Cato can accommodate VPNs with a remote access solution, and SD-WAN is necessary, allowing business to connect their international sites using the solution as the platform.

It is a primary router for the network. It is a cloud solution with on-prem routers. Basically, we got a router here, and we utilize our network connections to get to Cato Network's cloud. We route our traffic through their cloud for security and everything else.

It helps with network stability and reliability.

The WAN aggregation feature is the most valuable.

Its functionality is a bit limited in some areas as compared to a Cisco solution. It is not as granular. It doesn't have the manageability, feature set, and capabilities of a larger or an enterprise-level solution. It just needs a more robust feature set and granularity.

I have been using this solution since June, that is, about six months.

Its stability is pretty good so far. I had a couple of minor issues here and there, but not too bad.

It is hard to say because we don't have a lot of demands or requirements for that. We're not a large shop, so we're not looking to expand so much that we would have to replace them, upgrade them, or push the boundaries of the current system. It is expected to last us for a while at this capacity and configuration. We have 200 users, and it is just a typical office warehouse environment.

They are good and responsive. They solved all the issues.

We were using Palo Alto.

It was pretty basic. It is easy to manage.

You require one experienced IT person for its deployment and maintenance. It wasn't complicated for me, but I've been around. Somebody new to IT or a desktop support guy won't be able to deploy it. Somebody who is a network person and has a good network or IT experience can deploy and manage it with little or no assistance in a company of our size.

We had support from Cato Networks. They helped us with the deployment, and they were good.

It is going to give a return on investment. We have AT&T, Comcast, and a couple of others, but AT&T stability was hit or miss, and it would go down. The ability for this system to handle outages on one circuit out of four meant that we didn't have any downtime because of one of our circuits going down or having a performance issue. It kept our network up, whereas our previous solution, even at the cost of it, had to fail over, and even when it failed over, there were manual things you had to do for the other issues, which caused the downtime.

You pay yearly based on the speed of your network. If you increase the speed of your network, you increase the cost for your throughput. It is by bandwidth for the most part and then licenses for VPN. There is some per-seat licensing for VPN access, but the majority of it is minimal. It is like $30 a year per client. The rest is based on how much bandwidth you'll use. You pay for that upfront for the year, and if you have to increase it, you increase it, and then they let you send more data through. There are no additional costs in addition to the standard licensing fees.

We looked at other SD-WAN solutions, such as Fellow Cloud, Palo Alto, and Cisco. There were a couple more in there. Price, capability, and ease of deployment and management made us go for Cato Networks.

It is worth looking at for a small to medium size environment, but it has got to fit your situation. We don't use it for what it was really made to do. It just has one feature that affects us, so we use it for that. In all honesty, it is not something that we are really using to its full potential.

I would rate Cato Networks an eight out of ten. It is fairly new, so there are some things that it should do, and they're working on it. 

It's a network device that is used for WAN optimization and security.

It's a cloud-based solution that integrates well with everything. They are the classic SaaS solution.

We don't need to have a static IP from our provider, which saves us money.

I would like to see better integration with identity providers. Right now, they have Azure and they have Okta. 

For directory synchronization they use LDAP, and it would be better if they moved away from this. My understanding is that they are already working on removing LDAP completely and using web-based authentication for the VPN users and other users. This is not something that is critical for me. I just set up the main services in Azure and use that. This is okay because we don't have a lot of remote users, perhaps 10 or 20 at the maximum, with VPN access. This may change in the future.

We are in the testing phase of this solution. I have been testing Cato Networks for one month.

During the testing period, there were no outages. Everything was smooth and worked well.

This is absolutely scalable, which was the reason we decided to go with Cato Networks.

Technical support is excellent. Even during our testing phase, they were able to set up at least three hours to walk me through and answer my questions.

They were knowledgeable and I would rate them a five out of five.

The initial setup was straightforward.

It's easy to set up and we just connect to their network.

As we are still in the testing phase, we have not implemented it yet. There will be some implementation, but it's pretty basic. There is no complex setup like you would have with Versa for example. For the most part, it's plug and play.

There were some questions that I had to ask them, but for the most part, I set it up myself.

If you compare with VeloCloud, the price is the same or even cheaper. Also, they include all of the security features, unlike VeloCloud.

We had evaluated others such as VeloCloud and vScaler. 

The advantage of Cato Networks is that they have integrated steps, such as SD-WAN plus Network Security, plus VCNA altogether, in one management pane of glass. It's one place to manage everything. 

With VeloCloud it's SD-WAN, and there is no security. You would still have to get a dedicated endpoint like a firewall if you want added protection then it would be harder to manage it centrally.

vScaler can be integrated, but then it drives the price up significantly. Also, it's not an ideal solution.

One of the advantages of Cato is that they provide a static IP from their cloud and assign it to us. This is a service that comes with an additional cost, but it's cheap compared to if I get it from my service provider. 

Now that the trial period is almost over, I have decided that I am going to go with Cato Networks.

My advice for anybody who is looking into Cato is to consider their environment. If they have a scenario where it is 80% cloud-based and 20% internal traffic, then Cato is a good choice. If on the other hand, they have internal applications with a data center then other solutions may make more sense. For us, since we are fully cloud-based, it is a better choice.

In summary, it is easy to implement and easy to manage. That said, there are always ways to improve.

I would rate this solution a ten out of ten.

The solution is used similarly to a VPN connection but using a cable network. It is used for the several branches of the company.

The most valuable feature of Cato Networks is the CASB and the documentation is useful.

Modifying or incorporating Cato Network to work with a third-party platform, such as Microsoft, or other Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) offerings would be beneficial. Having more integration partners would help the users implement the solution.

I have used Cato Networks within the past 12 months.

Cato Networks is stable.

The solution is scalable.

The support has been good overall.

I have used Zscaler and it is a better solution than Cato Networks because they are more aggressive and have many partners, such as Microsoft and Dell. The implementation of Zscaler would be a more resilient solution.

The initial setup of Cato Networks is straightforward. For 100 branched the implementation took six months to implement.

The vendor helped implement the solution with us, and it was a seamless process

The price of Cato Networks is in the middle range compared to other solutions. NetFoundry is a less expensive solution than Cato Networks.

In the Philippines, there is a good market for this solution. There is a 50 percent SaaS implementation of this solution.

I rate Cato Networks an eight out of ten.

We're an implementer. We sell this solution to our customers. We've done some POCs with clients so far. 

The solution is stable and reliable. 

Our customers haven't had any complaints about its quality.

It is quite simple and easy to use. 

The support, overall, has been okay.

So far, we find the setup process to be simple. 

I haven't seen any issues so far. I might need to do another implementation and work on it longer before noting any flaws. 

They're not English. If they were English, I'd give them an overall rating of ten out of ten. 

There's no principal in Malaysia, only a distributor. 

I just recently started using the solution. I

I've used the solution for about six months. 

The solution has been stable and it is reliable. There are no bugs or glitches. It doesn't crash or freeze. 

On our POC we have about 300 users. 

Technical support has been good so far. We find them to be helpful and supportive. We're in Malaysia and our closest principal is in Singapore, and they always get back to us.

Positive

I'd rate the product's ease of setup at a 4.7 out of five. It's very straightforward and easy to implement. There isn't really any complexity. 

We deployed the product as a POC within a week.

It's too early to really analyze ROI. 

I have compared the pricing against other solutions and found it to be very reasonable. I'd rate the cost, in terms of affordability, eight out of ten. 

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten. It's simple to use and easy to set up. On top of that, they are very supportive.

We use the solution to access network and security platforms. It also offers in-built WAN and zero-trust security models. It is possible to detect and mitigate the incident using Cato.

The solution helps customers with well-integrated features, including security and network visibility.

The solution provides all the essential technical features combined in a single platform.

Adapting the solution for tier-one businesses with complicated environments and pre-existing technologies like VPN is challenging. They should improve this particular area. Also, they should include a web application firewall feature.

The solution is stable. However, sometimes, the console operates at variable speeds on the servers.

The solution is easily scalable in terms of firewall protection.

The solution's technical support is available 24/7. Once, we raised a ticket for our customer, and the executive immediately reached us in 10 minutes via Zoom meeting. Further, he solved the problem in the next 20 minutes. I am impressed with their service.

Positive

The solution's initial setup process is easy. Also, it is inexpensive to deploy domestic internet lines using the socket. It has automated functionality as well. The provisioning in the administration screen takes an hour to complete remotely. Also, replacing MPS lines with the solution takes a month. Here, we use second cellular lines as a backup. We are able to switch one to three lines per day.

The solution's pricing is flexible. The customers can pay as per their requirements. Although, it is more expensive than Palo Alto and Fortinet products.

I rate the solution a seven out of ten. Its pricing is flexible but could be even better.

The primary use case of this solution is to replace the routers we have and to combine the various ISP into one trunk.

It gives us higher internet bandwidth.

The feature that I find to be the most valuable is the bandwidth aggregation.

They can't do one-to-one NAT (Network Address Translation) in AP (their access point), and that is something that Palo Alto can do.

I have been using this solution for a few months.

We are using the most current version. It's a SAAS solution.

Cato Networks is stable.

It seems to be scalable, but we are a small company. Everyone in the company uses it. We are using their VPN for everyone who is working at home. All of the internet traffic is flowing through it. We have 175 people int total.

The technical support is very good. I would rate them a nine or ten out of ten.

They have been quite good for us.

Previously, we were using Palo Alto. 

We switched from Palo Alto because the renewal costs were getting expensive.

The initial setup is straightforward.

The price is not an issue for us, as it is priced more competitively than some other vendors.

It's a cloud solution. It has local hardware, but it's a could solution.

If it's a good use case for you, then it's a good solution. Cato Networks seems to do everything we wanted it to do.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.