A Connectivity Shift in Thinking

The VP of IT of a jewelry retail company was exploring connectivity options. The business had expanded to more than 20 locations and was still growing. They approached Opkalla about SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) as they wanted to explore options for securely connecting their team with the business applications they use.

Opkalla Technology Advisor Becca Black encouraged the VP of IT to consider SASE (Secure Access Service Edge) instead.

SASE provides a solution for secure access to network resources across the WAN. Combining network security functions, such as firewalls, intrusion prevention, and web filtering, with WAN capabilities, SASE creates a unified and streamlined security platform.  

At the time, the customer wasn’t familiar with this solution. He agreed to explore it. Black told him about Cato Networks, a SASE provider.  

“I explained to him that Cato was the latest and greatest in the SASE space,” Black said. “It’s the future of networking.”

At the time, Cato was the only provider offering SASE by definition.  

New Locations

With the retailer expanding to new locations, a big goal of theirs was to make the technology they use easy to deploy and extremely scalable. Cato checks these boxes. With the Cato solutions, one piece of equipment is sent to a new store, and the IT team can set it up remotely. There doesn’t have to be a single technical person at the store.  

“It’s easy to manage, easy to implement,” the customer’s IT Manager said.

Implementation was so easy, in fact, that the IT Manager was able to join the Cato project mid-implementation as a new project lead.  

What’s more, his team was able to set up 24 stores in a month.  

“It was good.”

Saving Headache and Money

Setting up 24 stores without Cato was a headache.  

“It would be a mess to set up 24 stores without Cato,” the IT Manager said. “For example, with the firewalls we were using prior, the MSP could preconfigure them and send them to the stores. But when you put them in place in the store and started using them, you might have issues that you would need to physically go to and fix. With Cato, everything is configured in the cloud. So when the appliance connects to the cloud, to the console, it downloads the configuration. It’s extremely easy.”

In addition to having an easy-to-implement and easy-to-use solution, Cato delivers other benefits to the customer. A big one was getting to cut back on their commitments with their managed services provider. They no longer need outside services to manage their firewalls. Immediately, it saved them tens of thousands of dollars in implementation services and ongoing hardware support costs.

Leveraging Cato’s SASE also means not needing a dedicated network engineer on the team. That’s one less salary to pay, and one less person for the IT manager to lead.  

Additionally, it means they don’t need someone observing the network through the night in case it goes down. They know Cato has that under control.  

A Modern Solution

Through their SASE solution, the IT team has also modernized the jewelry retailer’s IT processes. Prior, they had been using a Dell firewall. It was cumbersome to manage, with regular maintenance costs. The firewall also hindered remote capabilities. If a connectivity issue popped up, someone from IT had to go to the MSP to resolve with onsite store resources involved. Now all troubleshooting and repairs can be done fully remotely by the customer’s team.

What’s more, state of the art reporting enables the customer’s team to monitor usage. Through it, they see real-time bandwidth consumption, which computers are connected to the internet, what other devices are passing through, whether there are discarded packages or packet loss, and more. And the reporting features are continually improving.  

The IT Manager loves that.  

The Company Recommends Cato Networks

When asked if he would recommend Cato to other organizations, the IT Manager said, “I would recommend it to anyone that wants to have a simple and effective solution to use.”

In fact, he’s already recommended the solution to a fellow IT leader.  

To sum up his appreciation for Cato, he said, “It’s a really good platform. I really like it. It’s making the lives of people in IT simple. It’s making us work better, without having to work as hard.”

An IT leader’s dream.

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Cato provides the world’s most robust single-vendor SASE platform, converging Cato SD-WAN and a cloud-native security service edge, Cato SSE 360, into a global cloud service. Cato SASE Cloud optimizes and secures application access for all users and locations everywhere. Using Cato, customers easily replace costly and rigid legacy MPLS with modern network architecture based on SD-WAN, secure and optimize a hybrid workforce working from anywhere, and enable seamless cloud migration. Cato enforces granular access policies, protects users against threats, and prevents sensitive data loss, all easily managed from a single pane of glass. With Cato, businesses are ready for whatever’s next.