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 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. 

The solution is used for secure web browsing and setting up segregated networks. It is used for network security.

The VPN works really well. The product is efficient and easy to use. The ease of use is extremely good.

The solution is not cheap. The security could be improved further.

I have been using the solution for two years.

The tool is very stable. We haven’t had any issues. I rate the stability a nine out of ten. It’s difficult to understand whether the occasional stability issues are due to Cato or our local service provider.

Our whole company is using the tool in the USA and internationally. It can scale up to thousands of endpoints. The product is more suitable for enterprise environments.

We used Cisco AnyConnect before. We switched to Cato Networks because it is more secure. It also integrates with SSO.

The solution is cloud-based.

A third-party company deployed the tool for us.

The solution provides good value. We can limit the incidents and potential issues.

People buying the solution must remember that it must be a part of their security rollout for secure networks and VPNs. Overall, I rate the solution a nine out of ten.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

What I found most helpful in Cato Networks is that it works out of the box. One of its main advantages is that it's a simple product to deploy. You subscribe, and you're ready to run.

For a packaged solution, needing external intervention or a system integrator to get other features not offered by Cato Networks could be an area for improvement.

Cato Networks does what it's meant to do and is even overstretching capabilities when introducing new features. The product can only have very few features added on top of what its currently doing. Managed service providers can deliver the extra features you'd need. It's a set of managed services, and what Cato Networks does is very comprehensive.

So, for the time being, when the actual incarnation of the SASE solution is deployed, Cato Networks is a very effective product. Naturally, technology will evolve, so everybody knows that in three, four, or five years, there will be a new kid on the block, a new game. Still, at the moment, Cato Networks only needs to improve a little regarding SASE delivery. The product is doing very well, but one feature the Cato Networks team is doing right is preparing for the future through deploying the SSE 360, so the security service is at that edge. It's an excellent strategy to prepare for the future. SSE 360 is what Cato Networks should invest in the most to keep prospering.

I've been using Cato Networks for about three years.

Cato Networks is a very stable product. It's one of the top products in the SASE category, especially regarding stability.

Scalability-wise, Cato Networks is entirely scalable for what it does. I never found any problems scaling it. Apart from being very stable, Cato Networks is also very scalable.

The technical support team for Cato Networks has to be inevitably involved, especially in interfacing with other networks and data centers. I found the support very responsive. It's a very professional company, and I'd rate technical support as five out of five.

Cato Networks has a straightforward setup. There's very little to set up because it's a SASE solution, so there's no complexity in terms of programming it.

I'd rate its initial setup a five out of five.

Cato Networks is an expensive product, but it works out of the box, so that's the usual trade-off, make versus buy. If you decide to buy a product that doesn't require much programming, then you'd want to go for Cato Networks, which will work naturally, and immediately without any complex setup. However, the product is a little bit more expensive than the competitors.

On a scale of one to five, I'd rate the pricing for Cato Networks as four.

I have some experience with Cato Networks and its competitors.

My advice to anyone who wants to install or use Cato Networks is that the technical aspects would not be very relevant for a SASE solution because, today, you have outstanding solutions in the SASE realm. However, suppose you're undertaking a digital transformation effort. In that case, you must have an excellent consultant who can guide you in choosing among the myriad of products available in the market. You must define a clear digital strategy to understand if Cato Networks matches your digital strategy.

The next step involves checking if Cato Networks can meet your specific needs or use cases. The product is straightforward, but that also means it has some limitations. If you don't want to program as much, Cato Networks is for you, but that could also mean sacrificing other features, such as increased flexibility and total control of the system. Cato Networks is a black box, so you connect and use it, but you don't know what happens inside, though it's precisely what some clients want. Cato Networks is the perfect solution if the client wants to connect offices and premises in different regions.

You have to be fully aware that Cato Networks doesn't allow you complete control over it, but it's easy to use. There's no perfect solution in the market. It would be best if you had a system architect or consultant to guide you in your choice. If you make the wrong choice, you could have an excellent product that doesn't fit your needs. Making the right decision sometimes isn't based on the technology but on the IT strategy. This is what ninety-nine percent of companies miss today. Technology is all good, but you need a sound IT strategy for making your decision.

My rating for Cato Networks is eight out of ten because it's an excellent product, especially for what it offers. It isn't a ten for me, simply because when you deploy a SASE solution, especially in the environments my company serves, you need to implement additional features which aren't part and parcel of what Cato Networks is delivering, such as an integrated solution.

Suppose a client wants a perfect solution rated as ten out of ten. In that case, the client needs to employ a system integrator or a managed service provider that can add additional features to the top, as it's not the mission of Cato Networks to deliver other features. Cato Networks does an excellent job, but it wouldn't get a ten from me. However, no packaged SASE solution can cover all aspects and all client needs. You'll need an external intervention or someone adding features to what Cato Networks delivers. This is more of a category limitation rather than a company limitation. Cato Networks does an excellent job, so it gets the maximum score that can be assigned to the category for packaged solutions, which is an eight.