We have the sockets on-premise, some little small boxes that connect to the internet. You could have multiple providers connected to the socket, which connects over the internet to their ports. We use their infrastructure as a service.
The solution's primary use case is to have redundant ISP internet links and use their network for security purposes, ease of administration, and management. We use their firewall as a service too.
It's a pretty straightforward solution, and anything beyond that, we can easily contact support and have them maintain it for us. It does what it's supposed to do, and I like it.
The price could be better. Because of the price, we are considering moving to Cisco Meraki. It's our understanding that we could accomplish the same thing for less money.
I've been using Cato Networks for about two years.
Cato Networks is stable. Everything is dependent on the bandwidth that comes from the ISP. Because we have multiple ISPs connected, if one is having an issue, the other connection isn't. We never really had any outages.
Based on what we have now, if we wanted more bandwidth, we would literally have to go to the internet provider for that. That's not really a Cato issue. Cato is, at best, the infrastructure, but you still need it from your ISP. If you under-subscribed, then you won't get the expected performance. You have to rightsize it depending on how many users are using it and all of that.
I believe in continuous improvement, but the challenges in the past, let's say we need to connect to a cloud service that you're not familiar with and we want to use Cato, we pretty much call support and tell them what we're trying to do. They bill us, and we pay for it. If you need additional network support from another vendor, we use a consultant between all parties to get the job done.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give technical support an eight.
We had Cisco ASA devices and firewalls. It had a lot of complexity, and you needed special technical skill sets on staff, which we didn't have. We just wanted a simpler solution to get the job done, and Cato provided it.
The initial setup is straightforward. If there's any complexity, usually they have some excellent support engineers on staff that we're able to work with, and they seem to make it seamless.
We use direct support from the vendor, and when we needed additional support, we had a consultant who specializes in Cisco.
Cato Networks seems more expensive than Cisco Meraki.
On a scale from one to ten, I would give Cato Networks an eight.
