Security was also a concern. The local firewall appliances needed to be upgraded, which was a constant expense, and were insufficient to protect the organization. After two ransomware incidents, the CEO demanded a dramatically improved security posture. The complexity of the firewall appliances also complicated site deployments. “With a hardware firewall, we had to copy information to every site and make sure it stays updated, and whatever changes we make at the head office need to filter out to every branch,” says Dela Cruz. In a Head-to-Head Evaluation, Cato Reduces Security Costs By Half The IT team intended to replace the firewall appliances with on-premise next-generation hardware appliances, but while awaiting delivery of the new hardware, Dela Cruz heard about Cato. When we learned about the Cato solution, we liked the idea of simple and centralized management. We wouldn’t have to worry about the time-consuming process of patch management of on-premise 昀椀rewalls.” Cato connects all enterprise resources — locations, cloud resources, and mobile users — to a common, optimized global backbone, which today is built from more than 42 PoPs across the globe. With all traffic on the Cato backbone, Cato applies a common security policy to protect all resources. Next-generation firewall (NGFW), secure web gateway (SWG), URL filtering, malware prevention — all are built into the Cato service. Cato MDR, a managed threat detection and response (MDR) service, offloads the resource-intensive and skill-dependent process of detecting compromised endpoints onto the Cato SOC. Standard Insurance put its hardware acquisition on hold to evaluate Cato head-to-head. “We would easily spend double in terms of what we spend for Cato,” he says. The cost of the total solution Cato is providing us – including the centralized management, cloud-based monitoring, and reports – matches the cost of the 昀椀rewall appliances alone. Then we would still need to add in the cost of appliance management and the advanced protection and other components of the 昀椀rewalls.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Banking/Credit union & Financial Services 15