The infrastructure was technically sophisticated but had frequent issues. “It was not a well- integrated solution,” says van Vuuren. “There was little visibility and too many end user nuisances. I was always pushing our suppliers to solve our constant network issues. We needed to come up with another solution using SD-WAN that was better integrated and more cloud friendly.” Our locations were connected by MPLS and two Internet lines with dynamic routing and failover at each site.” BrandLoyalty Finds a True SASE Solution with Cato Brand Loyalty created an RFP and evaluated four supposed SASE suppliers, one of which was Cato. While de Laat was impressed with Cato right away, van Vuuren was skeptical. “I didn’t believe the Cato solution could work as well as they were claiming,” says van Vuuren. “I thought they were a bunch of cowboys, honestly, and that the network would buckle under all the Zoom and Microsoft Teams we worked with.” Two RFP requirements were that the solution be well integrated and easily managed centrally. Three of the vendors couldn’t meet those requirements. “They offered customized solutions, even our own custom points of presence,” says van Vuuren. We didn’t want something complex and tailor made for us. We wanted a solution like O昀케ce 365, a straightforward cloud service used by everyone that could scale quickly and easily as we grew, have continual service improvements, and gain new functionality without a lot of new cost. And we wanted a SASE solution, not one that required on-premises 昀椀rewall appliances with all their updates.” Cato connects all global enterprise network resources — including branch locations, mobile users, and physical and cloud datacenters — into a single secure, global, cloud-native network service. With all WAN and Internet traffic consolidated in the cloud, Cato applies a suite of robust security services to protect all traffic, including anti-malware, next-generation firewall, content filtering, and IPS. Connecting a location to Cato is just a matter of installing a simple Cato Socket appliance, which links automatically to the nearest of Cato’s more than 70 globally dispersed Points of Presence (PoPs). At the local PoP, Cato provides an onramp to its global backbone and security services. The backbone is not only privately managed for zero packet loss and 5 9’s uptime; it also has built-in Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 4