But the Arlington network was anything but lean. Arlington spent $10,000 per month for the 100 Mbits/s MPLS service and connections were still “choking out,” he says. MPLS’s infamous deployment times also meant he needed a 90-day window for deploying new offices — far too long for the firm. The existing firewall appliances were also sucking up resources he didn’t have. “Firewalls are complicated by default, but they’re even more complicated when set up by someone else who’s no longer with the company and with his or her own ideology and thought,” he says. Troubleshooting the performance problem that was “choking” his network wasn’t easy. The company’s office and regional networks were flat, layer-two subnets. Firewall appliances at each location were connected by meshed, point-to-point, virtual private networks (VPNs). Servers located in Arlington were accessed by the branch locations. George knew that some locations had performance problems, but diagnosing them was very difficult. “We could see the traffic, but figuring out the source of the problem was impossible,” he says. And with IT resources spent keeping “the lights on,” other projects had to be pushed to the side. Disaster recovery (DR) was one such example. “I could have set up a DR site using a site-to-site VPN,” he says, “But then I would have to put a whole lot of work into the effort and still have a single point of failure.” Cato’s “Easy Experience” Simpli昀椀es SD-WAN Adoption George had heard about the cost savings of SD-WAN from a local provider. During his research, he stumbled on to Cato and how Cato Cloud, Cato’s SD-WAN as a service, combines SD-WAN with FWaaS. He decided to trial Cato Cloud. I expected the company to take a month to get me equipment when two days later, I received two Cato Sockets (Cato’s zero-touch, SD-WAN appliances), precon昀椀gured for installation.” Within 10 minutes the Cato Sockets were installed and the Cato solution was working. “We had the whole shebang for a month. A fully functional, free trial for a month, to verify that it works. Apparently, that’s not very common with SD-WAN,” he says. For his due diligence, George went back to the initial provider. Instead of Cato’s converged secure SD-WAN as a service, the provider offered a managed service integrating third-party, SD-WAN appliances and firewall appliances. The result was a complex, heavy, and cumbersome environment. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Healthcare 12