Cato SASE Cloud Platform vs NFX Series Network Services Platform comparison

Fortinet FortiGate excels in providing integrated VPN, firewalling, and Unified Threat Management (UTM) with centralized management and high availability. It supports remote access and comprehensive threat protection, making it a preferred choice for securing networks.

Fortinet FortiGate offers a robust security platform with features such as strong intrusion prevention, application control, and web filtering. Its integration with Active Directory and SD-WAN functionality provides scalable solutions for large networks. Users appreciate its ease of use through centralized management interfaces, ensuring robust security with flexible configurations. However, FortiGate could enhance its graphical interface and technical support responsiveness, address firmware bugs and costly licensing, improve logging, integrate better with third-party tools, and strengthen scalability and memory for log storage. Complexity in configuration and the need for intuitive features are noted challenges, and there's a demand for advanced security, zero-trust capabilities, and AI integration.

• VPN: Secure remote access and connectivity.
• Firewalling: Protects networks from unauthorized access and attacks.
• UTM: Offers a comprehensive approach to threat management.
• SD-WAN: Optimizes traffic routing for efficient network performance.
• Web Filtering: Controls and monitors web access and ensures Internet security.

• Centralized Management: Simplifies administration and monitoring.
• High Availability: Ensures consistent security and network availability.
• Scalability: Adapts to the needs of growing networks.
• Comprehensive Threat Protection: Provides robust security measures.
• Ease of Use: Minimizes the complexity of security management.

Fortinet FortiGate is widely implemented across industries like education, finance, and government. Companies use it for firewall protection, VPN, and SD-WAN capabilities, ensuring secure perimeter and data center security. It facilitates remote access management and traffic routing optimization, offering reliable security and connectivity solutions.

Cato Networks is a leading SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) platform, combining SD-WAN and network security to obtain a cloud-native service. Cato Networks optimizes and secures application access for users and identities. The platform delivers a next-generation secure networking architecture that minimizes legacy IT infrastructures’ complexity, costs, and risks. The goal of Cato Suite is to connect any user to any application securely and optimally.

Cato Suite runs on a private global network of more than 65 PoPs (points of presence) connected via SLA-backed network providers. The service can connect branches, data centers, users, and clouds. Cato can be deployed in stages to augment legacy network services.

Cato Suite delivers end-to-end route optimization for WAN and cloud traffic. The architecture is self-healing, enabling a high service uptime.

Cato Features

Cato Cloud has a global backbone to deliver a reliable, global network. Here are some key SD-WAN features of Cato Cloud.

• Optimizes traffic flows: The Cato Suite can individually optimize traffic flows in the last mile - from the customer’s location to the point of presence, and also between PoPs. This feature eliminates the need for internet providers to hand off traffic to each other, avoiding the resulting latency and congestion.
  
• Controls and manages bandwidth: The software-defined overlay is encrypted across the entire cloud infrastructure. This overlay uses application-aware routing, analyzing latency and loss data to choose the best route according to network conditions. These features, like protocol priority marking, enable the system to ensure the performance of real-time applications.
  
• Delivers redundancy and failover: By connecting the points of presence with multiple Tier-1 IPs, Cato builds the redundancy needed to ensure security and highly available service.
  
• Cloud-native: Cato is built as a scalable, resilient, and elastic cloud service.
• Converged: The platform converges SD-WAN and network security into a single infrastructure framework.
  
• Secures all edges: Cato Network can secure and optimize traffic from all users, locations, applications, and clouds.

What challenges does Cato Network solve?

• Migration to SD-WAN

MPLS (multi-protocol label switching) networks are usually expensive and limited in their capacity. Cato simplifies migrating to a faster, higher-capacity internet and SASE cloud. Cato SD-WAN appliances enable customers to improve usable capacity and resiliency.

• Global connectivity optimization

Customers who suffer from the challenge of high latency and network inconsistency can use Cato to deliver a consistent connection and user experience to access on-premises and cloud applications.

• Securing branch internet access

Cato’s complete network security stack connects all branch locations to the Cato cloud, therefore protecting all traffic, both internet-bound and WAN, with enterprise-grade, cloud-based security services. This capability avoids having to backhaul internet traffic to a data center or hub or having to implement stand-alone cloud security solutions.

• Cloud acceleration and control

Organizations using Cato notice an acceleration of cloud traffic. Cato achieves this by routing all traffic from the edges to the PoP closest to the data center. Because of the close distance between the two, the latency is near zero.

Reviews from Real Users

An IT manager/project coordinator at a healthcare company says that “[Cato is] a cloud-based solution that integrates well with everything. They are the classic SaaS solution.”

Yeong-Gi L., a network engineer at Snetsystems, notes that “The solution is very stable. The scalability is quite good. Technical support was always helpful and responsive. The integration capabilities are not a problem at all.”

"The most valuable feature is that it also works as a next-gen firewall because it has security features," says Lorenzo S., senior solutions consultant Lead at MDI.