The Cato Experience Simplicity Gain “ “ With just one architecture, not three, we We’ve reduced our networking OPEX by can make changes in a few minutes that 50 percent and more since moving from required weeks with our MPLS provider. MPLS to Cato.” I liked the fact that the Cato service used Since the deployment, Sarja was able to Cato’s own technology. It makes your life show far better budget management. He’s easier when you’re working with the vendor. playing less per megabit for bandwidth and The knowledge is there, and logistical eliminating all of those appliances at each problems are resolved beforehand, making location has saved him a bundle. onboarding much easier.” Performance Testing Shows Cato Blows Away MPLS Sarja was determined to find an MPLS alternative. “We thought an appliance-based SD-WAN solution was the most promising approach, but the SD-WAN reseller was unable to get our POC started. There were cooperation issues with the SD-WAN vendor, and we were caught in the middle of everything,” he says. That’s when he learned about Cato. Sarja and his team tested Cato Cloud from Salcomp’s Finland datacenter and locations across China, Taiwan, and India. They deployed a Cato Socket at each location with policies in the local firewall steering the pertinent traffic to Cato. Three types of tests were performed: x Sharepoint file transfer and file sharing: Salcomp wanted Cato performance to be at least as good as the current 10 Mbits/s, MPLS connection or other SD-WAN providers over the Internet (also operating at about ~10 Mbps). x SAP user experience: Salcomp didn’t want any degradation in SAP experience as measured by running reports and in the time taken to execute transactions. x Office 365 performance: Uploading and downloading of files from Sharepoint Online in the Hong Kong region across Cato was to be compared against the regular Internet and other Internet- based SD-WAN solutions. Sarja was impressed with the results. Data throughput on Sharepoint file transfer testing from Taiwan to Finland with Cato was 30x better than MPLS with a WAN optimizer; file sharing improved by more than 40x. SharePoint Throughput Testing 50 40x+ 46 45 Mbits/s 40 30x 35 16 Mbits/s 30 25 20 15 10 5 0.5 1 Mbits/s Mbits/s 0 MPLS Cato MPLS Cato File Transfer File Sharing Within China, Sarja found downloading a 116 MB Excel file across the site’s 20 Mbits/s connection to Cato Cloud on average took 83 seconds. And across MPLS, download times were 20x longer. File Download Time Downloading 116MB Excel File 700 econds600 S 500 400 300 20x improvement 200 100 0 MPLS Cato Latency also dropped by 13% when tested from China to Finland across Cato. And not only was performance as good if not better than MPLS, but Cato deployment was much quicker. He could use any Internet line to connect locations to Cato Cloud, eliminating the six-month deployment times required for MPLS. Latency Reduction China to Finland 245 econds240 Millis235 230 225 13% improvement 220 215 210 205 195 MPLS Cato Salcomp Replaces MPLS with Cato Cloud Sarja decided to move forward with a phased migration of Salcomp’s production line onto Cato. Initially, the team connected the datacenter in Helsinki to Cato. Then, they migrated the Indian and Brazilian locations. During the final phase, they moved over the China locations of Shenzhen and Guigang, and the Taiwan location in Taipei. Across all locations, he replaced the routers, firewall appliances, and WAN optimizers with redundant Cato Sockets configured in high-availability mode. Without local firewalls, Sarja relied on Cato Security Services to protect against network-based threats. Cato Security Services is a fully managed suite of enterprise-grade and agile network security services built into Cato network that includes NGFW, SWG, Advanced Threat Prevention, Cloud and Mobile Access Protection and Network Forensics. Testing done by a leading mobile phone manufacturer vetted Cato’s security, allowing Sarja to extend an IPsec tunnel from the Cato network to the mobile phone provider’s premises. Salcomp IT: Better Positioned to Address New Challenges Sarja is planning a Microsoft Office 365 deployment and expects to connect his Office 365 instance to Cato. Cato dramatically improves cloud performance, routing traffic along the optimum path across the Cato backbone to the Cato PoP nearest to the customer’s cloud instance. Cato PoPs collocate in the same physical datacenters as the IXPs of Microsoft, AWS, and other leading cloud providers, making it a short hop across the datacenter’s local network into the cloud provider. It’s like having premium, direct cloud connections from 40+ locations across the globe – for free. Cato’s range of built-in optimizations also benefit unified communications. “Video quality with Microsoft Lync from China has been very good,” he says. Sarja is also looking at equipping mobile users with Cato SDP to connect to Cato Cloud, once their existing VPN licenses expire. Overall, Sarja says he’s received the best feedback any CIO could want from his users – nothing. “Users just aren’t complaining any longer,” he says. And that’s a very good thing. The Network for Whatever’s Next 5 Manufacturing Case Studies 12