We had an ongoing issue with provisioning MPLS.” Cato Gets Brake Masters Cruising Waibel knew he needed to fix his network and began researching SD-WAN vendors. “All totaled, we probably evaluated 10 to 12 SD-WAN vendors,” he says. But alternative SD-WAN solutions proved to be too expensive and complicated, requiring Brake Masters to maintain firewall appliances at every location. They also relied on the public Internet, which Waibel thought were going to be too unreliable and unpredictable for Brake Masters. With Cato, Waibel found a solution that met his needs. Cato is the first implementation of Gartner’s secure access service edge (SASE) architecture and converges security and networking into a global, cloud-native platform. Sites, mobile users, and cloud-resources – all connect to the nearest PoP of Cato’s global private backbone, a geographically distributed, SLA-backed network of 50+ PoPs, interconnected by multiple tier-1 carriers. The backbone’s cloud-native software provides global routing optimization, self-healing capabilities, WAN optimization for maximum end-to-end throughput, and full encryption. In the end, Waibel chose to deploy Cato across all 71 locations, configuring sites with a Cato Socket, Cato’s SD-WAN device, and dual last-mile Internet connections, typically cable and fixed wireless. “Currently, we’ve connected 55 locations and moving forward with converting the rest,” he says. Brake Masters Deploy Sites Quickly and Improves Performance Waibel says Cato meets all the needs for retail locations, including easy management, deployment, and getting notifications of potential network problems before they’re a big deal. “All that makes it very easy to run your retail establishments,” Waibel says. More specifically, opening new stores with Cato has been much faster and easier than with MPLS. “We order lines, and they’re always in well before the store is done,” Waibel says. Since we moved to Cato, our bandwidth increased by approximately 30 times the speed we had before. Now, the customer’s Wi-Fi experience is much better. We’ve stopped receiving complaints since deploying Cato.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 7