Cato SSE 360

Actually, we propose Moogsoft  as a solution. Previously we were using the solution for our customer, and we were basically using in-house to train our resources. We still propose this as a solution as part of our global product solutions, but currently, my role has changed, and I'm not in the same business line. So I'm not directly involved with solution selling to customers now. However, it's still part of our portfolio. We do offer this as a solution.

Previously, I was leading the tools as Chief Architect, tools and automation. So then I was directly responsible for Moogsoft  as a solution. We were pitching that, and then I was directly responsible for the solution. Now, in my new role, I am still selling it to my customer, but I no longer look into the tools as my ownership because that's a chief architect job.

I'm not directly responsible, but I can tell you as part of our international tooling strategy, we are having a partnership now with ServiceNow  as the core tool. So being ServiceNow  as our core platform, eventually it will provide a journey end to end from project management will also be onboarded as various solutions on top of ServiceNow platform.

We sell it to our customers. When we define solutions for our customers, we do offer the features under ITOM. So on a pre-sales level, I can say that we have used it, but on a customer environment, I would say I personally have not hands-on experience with ITOM. But I know what it supports, what is the pricing, what are the capabilities as a pitch on the pre-sales. When you propose a solution to customer and then you offer them the tooling. We do offer ITOM a lot, although it's expensive, the way they charge your basis, the number of devices, the features that you want to use and the typical licensing around it. So it's pretty complex and expensive, but it's very powerful at the same time.

On the observability side, I've used Splunk a bit. I've used Moogsoft, but that was more of a tool. I've used Dynatrace . I have good exposure to various tools though I'm missing some names.

It's technically much less complex with Palo in terms of configuration management and policy management. It's pretty straightforward in terms of complexity.

Our products are typically around SASE  solutions, SD-X using these two OEMs or maybe there are more OEMs. For example, we work with Cato SASE Cloud Platform . We work with Fortinet as one of the larger products that we sell, mostly around SASE  and SSE solutions.

Cato SASE Cloud Platform  is new in our portfolio. It's been six months that we have engaged with them, and we are offering that solution to some of our partners and customers as well. It's very lightweight but very powerful at the same time. So we are exploring their solutions currently.

The benefits and use cases remain consistent. It's a one-stop solution. You do not need to have different products to manage the SASE environment. They offer a very lightweight and powerful console where it has everything needed to manage as a service. Being cloud-based, they have very good integrations with third parties. They offer various types of APIs where you can interconnect your network with different solutions. It's not heavy something Splunk. The UX part is very user-friendly. The dashboards are clean and crisp. The level of customization that you can do from your UX is very powerful. In terms of service and reliability, the platform is pretty stable and they're expanding very fast.

The platform offers more than 400 different types of interfaces. This allows you to bring this solution as part of a bigger solution if you need various different components on your network. It's very easily fittable as a brick. If you talk about solution, then it's a very good brick which is easy to fit. The integrations are available off the shelf which do not need a lot of customization. It's quite plug and play.

The policy center and the ease of managing all those policies and configuration is pretty straightforward. It's easy to use for users. If you need to spend 30 minutes in any other product, you will spend only 15 minutes here.

It's flexible. If you have a large organization and if you are divided in zones, your other zones use some different solutions. It's very easily fittable that you can still continue to work on your other products while Cato SASE Cloud Platform fits in very smoothly. It allows you the flexibility of using multiple products at the same time within the same organization. It's a flexibility of adaptability and adoption.

I may not be that equipped now, but there are certainly growth areas for them, especially around how they provide reporting and monitoring and then flexibility of combining it with an observability part attached to it. This would remove the need to integrate another specialist tool for observability or monitoring part.

They would certainly employ AI, especially agentic AI. I think that should be already part of their roadmap as a transversal. But certainly, the kind of integrations they offer today, in the future, I would think they would add more and more feature sets, especially around where they remove the dependency of having specialist solutions on a typical monitoring side.

I think it's a fair price. It's positioned very well in the market. It's not low or very high. In the future, I hope that with more services being bundled as part of the solution on the cloud side, they should reduce the price being, provide bundle service. I think in the future they will come up with reduced pricing, more competitive pricing. But today it's fair. It's not very low or very high.

It's pretty much stable and that's one of the reasons that more and more customers are onboarding. On the stability scale, it's probably around nine. We have not seen many issues with Cato SASE Cloud Platform recently.

It's very fast and easy to scale. In terms of strength, it's very high.

They provide very good technical support, but their professional services are very expensive.

Positive

Because of my role in sales and business development, I do not work on tools anymore.

The setup is pretty straightforward in terms of complexity. The onboarding of devices or new branches is straightforward.

Their implementation team can be rated between eight to nine out of ten.

My business development role is basically for a group which is an expert team more on the network solutions, less monitoring. Previously it was more on monitoring, now it's more on SD-WAN and SD-WAN incubation, SASE and SSE solutions around it with Palo Alto and Fortinet. I've moved on to that part, so I'm not primarily looking into the tools here.

The features are available for much less than Palo Alto. Palo Alto is more expensive today.

Palo Alto is pretty close to Cato SASE Cloud Platform. However, on the pricing, Palo Alto is more expensive being a more matured player in the market. Certainly, Fortinet is big in volume, but on the pricing, Fortinet offers better pricing.

My experience would be four out of five. I personally need to understand it more deeply. But it appears good at this point, as it's one of the good products which are expanding very fast and the market adoption is very good. I rate Cato SASE Cloud Platform as nine out of ten.

In construction, we have a company in the steel industries, where we are doing the POCs currently, and we have one exchange, Al-Jabr Exchange. We have a few others lined up, but currently, we manage this construction group.

Basically, we are providing the solutions for industries, such as the manufacturing industry, construction group, and a money exchange group. Additionally, we have another customer lined up, which is RPM, a rapid response team in the medical field.

My relationship with the Cato SASE Cloud Platform  vendor is as a partner.

The Cato SASE Cloud Platform  supports my customers' needs for connectivity and security by removing the throttling from the headquarters and putting a firewall in the cloud, instead of having to use a costly MPLS network to perform security inspection on all traffic from various branches. Now, with Cato SASE  Cloud Platform solutions, branches no longer need to go to headquarters for inspection; they are picked up from the cloud, which increases efficiency and protection.

The most useful security feature of Cato SASE  Cloud Platform for my customers is the Firewall as a Service (FaaS), which provides a single firewall solution that scales regardless of the size of the enterprise.

Cato's global SD-WAN capability impacts network performance positively by partnering with global tier-one networks, which increases efficiency, guarantees SLAs, improves speed, and reduces packet losses, making it a more efficient solution compared to traditional IPsec.

I don't see any areas of improvement for Cato SASE Cloud Platform since they have all their solutions in-house and implement suggestions rapidly, providing a continuous improvement process without any current challenges.

Having worked with the Cato SASE Cloud Platform solution for eight months and previously as a TAC engineer with Palo Alto and Cisco, I don't see any room for improvement as they provide everything we need for a SASE solution.

I don't have anything to mention regarding improvements at the moment, but I can contact you in a few months for any further observations as I continue to explore the solution.

I have been working with the Cato SASE Cloud Platform for eight months.

The deployment time is indeed quick, taking just two hours, and I have faced no significant challenges with Cato SASE Cloud Platform during this time; it has been easy to use.

Stability shows no complaints on my end.

The setup is straightforward from one to ten, and my customers are using it mainly in public clouds. For scalability, I would rate Cato SASE Cloud Platform as perfect.

Support is rated at eight out of ten.

Positive

The SD-WAN functionality improves network connectivity by optimizing traffic and reducing latency, which can lead to a return on investment with cost savings. Specifically, it replaces costly MPLS links with SD-WAN and utilizes an internet-based backbone with intelligent routing, resulting in a cost reduction of 40% to 60%.

The pricing is reasonable and depends on the usage.

I am also a partner with Cato SASE Cloud Platform.

Mentioning the bypassing feature and traffic engineering would be fine.

Currently, I find no need for any small improvements for Cato SASE Cloud Platform, but I have noticed that they implement suggestions rapidly, and although I'm not facing challenges now, I could think of potential additional features in the future, such as improvements in DHCP IP release functionality, which I have already requested.

To summarize, I recommend this solution for medium to enterprise-sized businesses. I am Mr. Anas Abdul Rauf, working for FSD Innovative Technologies as a network security engineer, and I hold a CCIE certification. I am set to work on FishOS  as the first authorized partner in the GCC region, enabling me to provide further reviews after some months.

I rate the Cato SASE Cloud Platform a 10 out of 10.

I use Cato SASE Cloud Platform  primarily as a single vendor, integrated SD-WAN plus SASE  solution.

All features are toggle switches on the platform, making it easy to turn them on and off. It integrates with AI systems, and the dashboard provides insights into faults through an XDR  platform. It offers network and security event workbenches, AI history, and summaries of faults. It is scalable for end users across network and cloud sides and saves operational costs.

The platform lacks strong security features on the edge. All security features are on the cloud. For someone who wants to break out traffic locally from the LAN, there are only basic firewalls included. I would like to see more robust edge security features to replace existing customer on-premises firewalls.

I have been working with Cato SASE Cloud Platform  for one year.

The solution is highly scalable. As an MSSP , we find it scalable for end users across EPP platforms, network, and cloud sides. It is an ideal option for those looking for a single integrated solution and a refresh from point solutions.

As a partner, I receive very good support from Cato. Their knowledge portal and Cato Academy portal are excellent resources. Features are updated weekly and automatically, which is very convenient.

Positive

I have worked with solutions from Fortinet and Palo Alto. Cato offers a built-in platform perspective with all features integrated into a single platform, unlike competitors who have acquired various components like SD-WAN or CASB  that may run on different platforms.

I was not directly involved in the deployment, but our team has set up five or six customers in the last year. The platform is very easy to deploy.

I've worked closely with Fortinet. I'm aware of Palo Alto and Netskope  but have not seen strong integrated platforms from them.

I rate Cato SASE  Cloud Platform at 9.5 out of 10. There is always room for improvement, especially in edge security features.

We have been using Cato Networks  as a solution for firewall and secure web gateway.

It's provided us the solution for firewall and secure web gateway.

The main features we use are the firewall and secure web gateway.

There isn't much to improve as we have a close relationship with them, providing information for research and development. We cannot disclose further details due to a nondisclosure agreement.

We have been working with Cato Networks  for two years now.

I would rate the stability of the solution as ten on a scale of one to ten.

We chose Cato Networks due to its scalability and ability to expand the network.

Our customer service experience is excellent, however, this might be due to our special partnership with them.

Positive

We did a lot of evaluations. Most competitors didn't meet our needs due to pricing and functionality.

The initial setup was done in-house and was simple.

The setup was handled in-house, without the need for consultants.

I would rate the pricing as seven out of ten. The pricing is flexible due to our special partnership with Cato Networks.

We compared it with competitors like Versa and Prisma.

I would definitely recommend Cato Networks to other users.

I'd rate the solution nine out of ten.

We primarily use the platform for monitoring purposes. It serves as a SaaS solution integrated with SD-WAN and security functionalities.

The product's most valuable features include advanced firewall capabilities for robust security, a secure gateway for safe data transmission, and next-generation anti-malware for threat prevention. Additionally, the SASE framework integrates well with our operational needs, ensuring comprehensive security and compliance.

The product's technical support could be more responsive.

I have been using the Cato SASE Cloud Platform for around seven months.

I rate the product stability a nine. 

The product accommodates varying customer requirements effectively, facilitating easy scaling as needed.

I would rate the scalability an eight. 

The technical support services need improvement. 

Positive

The initial setup process was straightforward, taking about one to one and a half hours. It involved minimal complexities, handled efficiently by two individuals, primarily myself.

Based on studies from Forrester, our organization has achieved a significant return on investment of approximately 246% within less than six months of deploying Cato.

The platform is expensive. 

Cato's user-friendly dashboard has contributed positively to our experience, making it suitable for our current operational needs.

Integrating SD-WAN has significantly optimized our network performance by enabling path selection for optimal traffic routing, WAN optimization through protocol acceleration, and seamless traffic encryption without compromising performance.

I rate it an eight.