It was the classic difference between traditional, appliance-centric, managed services and the elastic, software-driven cloud all of which led to serious adoption and configuration problems for George. “The provider wanted me to buy without a trial. What person in his right mind would use a service without a trial?” he says. “I was on a call with 10 of their people, and they said, ‘Okay we’re going to replace your firewall.’ I said ‘WHAT? No, you’re not!’ Replacing the firewall or placing the SD-WAN appliance in front of the firewall would have meant reconfiguring his entire site-to-site VPN just for a trial.” “When I told them that they needed to place the appliance alongside the firewall. Their response was ‘that’s complicated.’ One dude from Cato figured out the problem in five minutes you mean your entire team couldn’t get it to work?” he says. “After a month, the reseller still hadn’t given us the trial.” Arlington Deploys Cato in Minutes In the end, George went back to Cato. “Yes, Cato met my technical requirements, but the reason why I returned and am staying with Cato is that it made buying SD-WAN so simple.” Rather than ripping-and-replacing the firewall, Cato allowed George to extend the life of his firewall and transition off as needed. External traffic could be sent to a Cato Socket sitting alongside the existing firewall. The traffic is secured by the Cato Security Service built into Cato Cloud Network. Cato Security Services include next-generation firewall (NGFW), secure web gateway (SWG), and IPS. As firewalls would reach their end-of-life or the limits of their capacity, traffic can be moved over to Cato. They can also be configured to “burst” to Cato Cloud. Any implementation has its share of challenges and McNeil’s Cato deployment was no different. “We had a problem accessing Cato’s Dallas PoP [point of presence] at one point,” he says, “Yes, things were a bit slower, but our users didn’t notice it so much. The Sockets automatically migrated everyone to Cato’s Chicago PoP. But here’s the thing — we didn’t have to do anything. Our firewall rules remained the same, there was no reconfiguration, and Sockets automatically re-connected to the Dallas PoP when Cato resolved the problem.” Better Management, Better Control with Cato With Cato, George has improved agility, increased visibility, and control, and expanded his level of service to the business all without scaling up his IT team. Deploying new sites takes far less time. “With Cato, I am setting up an office before they have electricity to every socket,” he says. McNeil can also diagnose problems more efficiently. By sending all traffic to the Cato PoP, McNeil gains a single-pane-of-glass into his network. He’s been able to use that tool to improve governance and IT’s interaction with the business. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Healthcare 13