Cato Networks Retail Case Study

How Cato Networks helps Customers in the Retail vertical.

Cato Case Studies Retail

Contents BrandLoyalty Achieves Fast Performance and Network Maturity with Cato 3 MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Cloud Acceleration and Optimized • Global Connectivity Control Brake Masters Puts the Brakes on Outages Across 71 Sites with Cato 6 Affordable MPLS Alternative • MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Simple Network Automation Aquila Connects 60+ Locations Across Australia with Cato’s Global Managed SD-WAN 9 Mobile Access Optimization • Firewall as a Service • Cloud Acceleration and Control • Secure and Optimized SD-WAN Pet Lovers Deploys 100-site SD-WAN, Eliminates Firewalls with Cato Cloud 13 Branch Appliance Elimination Global Food Supplier Uses Cato Cloud to Ensure Global Performance, Security and High Availability 17 MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Optimized Global Connectivity • Affordable MPLS Alternative • Secure Branch Internet Access Cloud Acceleration and Control • Global Enterprise • Remote Access Security and Optimization Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 2

BrandLoyalty Achieves Fast Performance and Network Maturity with Cato MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Cloud Acceleration and Optimized • Global Connectivity Control The Network Challenges of a Global Enterprise I always assume that the solution a vendor IT leaders know all too well the challenges of global MPLS solutions. describes is much more The high costs of global MPLS circuits are well documented but less beautiful that it is in reality, spoken about are the little things like the lack of network visibility and but with Cato the promises the integration challenges needed to keep the solution operational to were all true!” say nothing of the problems with moving to the cloud. Such were the Arne van Vuuren, challenges facing BrandLoyalty. Head of IT Operations A provider of customer loyalty and incentive programs to food retailers worldwide, BrandLoyalty infrastructure connects offices About across Europe. “We work with leading global brands & licenses such BrandLoyalty as Disney or Zwilling that demand a reliable, secure, well-managed infrastructure from their partners, says Ben de Laat, head of IT security Based in the Netherlands, at BrandLoyalty. “It’s very important for us to have not only high-quality BrandLoyalty provides offices, desks, chairs, awesome coffee, and great lunches, but high- winning loyalty campaigns quality Internet and well-managed end-user devices.” by connecting high- With limited IT resources, BrandLoyalty had be very careful about frequency retailers, the technology choices it makes. The company was in the middle our partners, and of a full migration to Microsoft Azure with a WAN infrastructure that shoppers. BrandLoyalty was complex and not well suited for the cloud. “Our locations were fully supports the retailer’s connected by MPLS and two Internet lines with dynamic routing and journey, from strategy to failover at each site,” says Arne van Vuuren, Head of IT Operations. solution and execution. “We had WAN optimizers and firewall appliances at each location, with failover for each.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 3

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

WAN optimization to dramatically improve throughput. Cato monitors network traffic and selects the optimum path for each packet across the Cato backbone. Mobile users run across the same backbone, benefiting from the same optimization features, improving remote access performance. Paradoxically, both de Laat and van Vuuren decided on Cato during a phone call with another contender. “We had an epiphany,” says de Laat. De Laat asked the other vendor how they could accommodate BrandLoyalty if it decided to implement a CASB solution in two years. There was a lot of silence on the other end, and then the contender said they would have to do it in only one of our customized PoPs.” That was when it hit De Laat and van Vuuren that they were done with the customized route. They wanted something new and Cato was the only contender offering a new solution.“ It was clear Cato was the most mature SASE solution out there Cato Delivers a Fast Transition, Performance, and Visibility The transition to Cato was fast and easy. “Officially it took four months, but it was really more like two- and-a-half,” says van Vuuren. Setting up the Cato Sockets was a breeze, and the performance was fast from day one. “It took an afternoon for our implementation partner, IPknowledge, to set up all the locations,” says van Vuuren. “I told some friends about the Cato rollout, and they didn’t believe me.” Aside from its top-notch performance, including for Zoom and Teams, configuring the Cato solution was also easy and visibility was dramatically better than with the company’s previous network. “We made a bunch of rules, implemented them, and it all worked right out of the box,” says de Laat. “Immediately we saw new things on our network such as users accessing servers that were supposed to have been decommissioned. Aside from the security functionality Cato offers, Cato’s visibility and control add a lot to your security posture. We have so much more in-depth knowledge our own network than we ever had before.” And Cato’s remote and home users get the same network performance and security as those in the office. “I always assume that the solution a vendor describes is much more beautiful than it is in reality, but with Cato the promises were all true,” says van Vuuren. “Cato’s solution has pushed BrandLoyalty forward with a mature, professional network, which we really needed. And we still have a Cato library of unused functionality to help make our network even more mature down the road.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 5

Brake Masters Puts the Brakes on Outages Across 71 Sites with Cato Affordable MPLS Alternative • MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Simple Network Automation Outages Keep Business in Steve Waibel, Second Gear Director of IT Network connectivity is essential to any retail operation. Unreliable, About slow network access can translate into lost revenue through credit Brake Masters card processing delays and lower customer satisfaction as guest Wi-Fi grinds to a halt. Brake Masters is an auto repair chain in the western Just ask Steve Waibel. The director of IT for Brake Masters, a leading United States with 71 auto-repair chain spanning 71 sites across the United States, had company-owned retail been struggling with his legacy MPLS service. The MPLS network stores and 30 franchises. connected Brake Masters’ 71 stores with T1 lines, carrying Point of Before migrating to Cato, Scale (PoS) system for credit card processing and the guest Wi-Fi the company owned- for customers to pass the time while waiting to get their cars repaired stores, served by Brake back to the Brake Masters datacenter in Tucson, Arizona. Masters IT, had redundant But Waibel found that the MPLS to be “just plain unreliable” and slow, firewall appliances he says. “We faced weekly outages in one store or another,” he says. connected by T1 lines and MPLS. All traffic was sent The network was also unable to deliver a decent guest Wi-Fi experience. from the retail locations The free Wi-Fi from Brake Masters was often limited to just 500 Kbits/s, to a datacenter in Tucson, far too slow for YouTube or to do much more than basic Web browsing. Arizona. The primary “We got quite a few complaints about that,” Waibel says. applications were point- And MPLS proved to be a drag on Brake Masters’ schedule for opening of-sale (PoS) systems and new stores. When a new store was ready to open, they were often retail customer Wi-Fi. waiting on connectivity. “We had an ongoing issue with provisioning MPLS,” Waibel says. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 6

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

With Cato, he also vastly improved his customer Wi-Fi experience. “Since we moved to Cato, our bandwidth increased by approximately 30 times the speed we had before,” Waibel says. “Now, the customer’s Wi-Fi experience is much better. We’ve stopped receiving complaints since deploying Cato,” Waibel says. The changes in the last mile infrastructure also meant better uptime. “None of our sites have lost complete connectivity since deploying Cato,” he says, “Sure, there are disruptions in the last mile, but the Cato Socket just moves the traffic over the secondary connection. The users never know the difference,” Waibel says. The portal makes it easy to set up a new site, manage a site, and manage firewall rules. “The management portal is well designed. It’s my favorite feature,“ he says, “All the information you need to manage the network is right there.” A case in point is his security infrastructure. Instead of deploying branch security appliances, Waibel relies on Cato security services – NGFW, anti-malware, and Cato IPS. He administers his security rules centrally in the Cato management portal, automatically applying them to the stores everywhere – all without deploying additional security appliances. And when there are problems, Waibel has been able to resolve disruptions far faster with Cato. “We get a view of every single store, and we can tell if there’s a problem at any store,” Waibel says. “Every day, we know exactly what’s going on, and we can address any issues that might be there.” New Network. Great Experience. Instead of stores calling in with problems, Cato automatically notifies Waibel of connectivity issues. “Often, we’re already on top of things when the store becomes aware of the issue,” he says. “With Cato, we’ve become very proactive.” Compared to what we used for six years with MPLS, it’s like night and day. And I would never go back. I would recommend Cato to other companies considering moving to SD- WAN. Opening new stores now goes smoothly, pricing is a昀昀ordable, the cloud 昀椀rewall and private backbone provide a great experience, and services are easy to set up”. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 8

Aquila Connects 60+ Locations Across Australia with Cato’s Global Managed SD-WAN Mobile Access Optimization • Firewall as a Service • Cloud Acceleration and Control • Secure and Optimized SD-WAN Internet VPN Becomes too Mike Zidaj, Complex and Limited for IT Manager Growing Company About Aquila Like many retailers, Aquila needed to connect its many stores; an Aquila manufactures Internet-based VPN sounded like the right approach. It was available premium quality footwear everywhere and didn’t pin the company to a carrier. And it was and is based in Melbourne, affordable, which made it well suited for connecting small retail outlets, Australia. The company some with only a single computer. used an Internet-based VPN to connect 60 retail But as the premium quality footwear manufacturer grew, Internet- locations, headquarters, based VPNs limitations became all too apparent. With 60 retail and warehouses. The locations, warehouses, a headquarters, and applications running in VPN also connected the Azure, Aquila’s VPN became incredibly complex. company’s database, “With each new store, we had to manually establish VPN connections payroll, and inventory with every other location. At first, it wasn’t that big a deal, but with more systems running as Azure sites, we ended up spending hours establishing the VPN. It just didn’t instances. Public Internet scale,” says Mike Zidaj, the IT Manager at Aquila. access was through the firewall in the office And since stores had to be manually connected, uptime was often headquarters. compromised. If the local staff didn’t properly connect the VPN then IT had to manually log in every Sunday to force a connection to enable inventory logging at the site. “At any one time, approximately 30 percent of our offices were showing offline at the headquarters,” he says. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 9

With each new store, we had to manually establish VPN connections with every other location. At 昀椀rst it wasn’t that big a deal, but with more sites, we ended up spending hours establishing the VPN. It just didn’t scale.” What’s more with encrypted traffic (HTTPS) only growing, Zidaj was increasingly losing visibility into company’s Internet usage. The firewalls lacked the horsepower to decrypt the traffic. “We attempted to do URL filtering with our aging, end-point control software but it was hard to manage, lacked centralized reporting, and not all that effective. Users could easily get around it,” says Zidaj. As a result, security was at risk and visibility was limited. “We couldn’t tell if employees were watching YouTube or working. There was simply no easy way of enforcing security policies on Web traffic,” says Zidaj. Zidaj Rejects MPLS and Turns to Cyber Risk and Cato For Helpe Zidaj began looking around for a solution not only for his connectivity and security challenges. He considered deploying an MPLS service: “A lot of retailers were using MPLS and local firewalls,” he says, “But the approach was too costly and would have locked us into the telco.” Zidaj heard about Cato and turned to CyberRisk, a Cato partner, for assistance. “As a thought leader and trusted advisor in enterprise networking and security, we are excited to partner with Cato Networks in the ANZ region and see the value Cato delivers to our customers,” says Leong Wang, Director of CyberRisk. “Cato Networks is a leader in next-generation networks with integrated security services and is a huge differentiate from the aging global telco model.” Zidaj decided to take the plunge. He replaced his Internet-based VPN and end-point control software with Cato. Cato Cloud is the only managed SD-WAN service that connects and secures mobile users, the cloud, branch offices, and headquarters across Australia and the rest of the globe with the agility of the cloud. As a thought leader and trusted advisor in enterprise networking and security, we are excited to partner with Cato Networks in the ANZ region and see the value Cato delivers to our customers.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 10

Zidaj leveraged Cato’s mobile security and optimization to connect small locations with just a Cato Mobile Client. Avoiding appliances at each retail location significantly simplified deployment. Without an appliance to install and maintain, deployment was quick and simple. What’s more, all too often retail locations set in malls can only gain Internet access through private IPs provided through the mall’s Internet provider. Unlike many SD-WAN solutions, the Cato Mobile Client, as well as Cato’s SD-WAN device, the Cato Socket, can operate behind a NAT. Zidaj equipped the computers at each retail store with Cato mobile clients. The mobile client sends all traffic across an encrypted tunnel automatically established to the nearest Cato point of presence (PoP). Cato Cloud currently covers all major Australian business centers from PoPs in Perth, Melbourne, and Sydney. His Azure instances were connected through Cato’s agentless integration into Cato Cloud. A few clicks on the Cato Management Console and an IPsec VPN connection was established from the Cato PoPs to Microsoft Azure. Cato collocates its PoPs in the same physical datacenters as the Internet Exchange Points (IXPs) of the leading cloud datacenter providers, such as AWS and Azure. Deployment was good, and the setup was pretty simple and straightforward. The Cato sales team, Cato Support, and CyberRisk helped a lot. It went well. We selected Cato, in part, because of its super quick and easy deployment.” When Zidaj is ready, he’ll also be able to connect larger locations with Cato Sockets. Cato Sockets connect load balance traffic across multiple circuits — MPLS or Internet (DSL, Cable, LTE and more) for maximum performance and uptime. Sockets correct for packet loss and dynamically route Internet and WAN traffic across the optimum last mile to the nearest Cato PoP. The PoP’s cloud- native software inspects all traffic, even SSL/TLS traffic, applying the necessary networking and security policies. Traffic is forwarded across Cato’s global network or onto the Internet. All Cato Sockets come with Affordable High Availability (HA) built-in for inexpensive redundancy. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 11

Deployment is Simple, Visibility and Control Improve Signi昀椀cantly Since deploying Cato, Zidaj has seen uptime improve significantly. “Our Cato dashboard now usually shows all locations connected and says users have noticed the more reliable access,” he says. Better network connectivity has directly impacted the business. Now our inventory database stays current because with Cato our connectivity is so solid. If there’s a brownout or even a blackout on one line, Cato auto-connects by itself.” And with Cato’s next-generation firewall (NGFW) inspecting all Internet and WAN traffic — encrypted and unencrypted — Zidaj is able to better secure his network. “The single pane management also gave us much improved control and visibility. Management is now able to see if shop staff are visiting Web sites that didn’t comply with our security policies — and take action.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 12

Pet Lovers Deploys 100-site SD-WAN, Eliminates Firewalls with Cato Cloud Branch Appliance Elimination Challenge: How to Connect and David Whye Tye Ng CEO &Executive Secure 100+ Stores Easily and Director A昀昀ordably About Like many retailers, Pet Lovers needed an effective way to secure its Pet Lovers stores and franchises. The spread of massive ransomware outbreaks, Pet Lovers Centre Pte such as NotPetya, concerned David Whye Tye Ng, the CEO and Ltd is a leading Asian executive director at Pet Lovers. retailer of pet products Pet Lovers had already connected and secured traffic between and services. It is one of stores with an Internet-based, virtual private network (VPN). Routers the largest and oldest at every store directed point-of-sale (POS) traffic across the IPsec pet store chains in VPN to firewalls in the company’s Singapore datacenter housing its Singapore. Today, Pet POS servers. But other than the datacenter and four stores, none of Lovers Centre has 65 the locations had firewalls to protect them against malware and other stores in Singapore, 23 attacks. Protection was particularly important as employees accessed stores in Malaysia, and 5 in the Internet directly. Thailand. Adding firewall or unified threat management (UTM) appliances at each site would have been cost prohibitive and taken far too long to deploy. For those sites equipped with firewall appliances, managing them was “tedious and slow,” says Ng. All security policy changes had to be implemented by the local service provider running the firewalls. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 13

He considered connecting the sites via an MPLS service. But following a “meticulous” assessment of the costs and offerings of the managed service, he says that neither MPLS nor deploying security appliances could meet his needs for low-cost, rapid deployment, and ongoing management.“We had WAN optimizers and firewall appliances at each location, with failover for each.” We did not want to be held hostage to the costs of MPLS and wanted a security solution that would be scalable and simple.” Cato Cloud Simpli昀椀es Security and Networking at Scale Ng had heard about Cato Cloud and it’s built-in Firewall as a Service (FWaaS). He decided to take a closer look. Cato’s FWaaS includes a next-generation firewall (NGFW) as well as other security services, such as secure web gateway (SWG), Advanced Threat Prevention, and network forensics. All security and networking services are integrated together, enabling Ng to define rich policies tapping security and networking information from across Cato Cloud. With Cato Cloud, Ng could simplify his implementation. Pet Lovers would be able to aggregate traffic from all stores, its datacenter, and, if necessary in the future, mobile users and cloud infrastructure into a common SD-WAN in the cloud. And since Cato Cloud includes FWaaS, Ng would be able to secure everything connected to Cato Cloud, avoiding the costs of deploying and managing new and existing firewall appliances. Delivering security from the cloud also appealed to him. Ng had seen first-hand the limitations of UTM appliances. Their feature lists look great on paper. But increased traffic loads or enabling compute-intensive features can force unexpected appliance upgrades. With the cloud’s near limitless resources, he did not anticipate such problems with Cato Cloud. The cloud also brought another advantage — simplicity. As a result of maintaining the SD-WAN and security functionality in the cloud, deployment of Cato Cloud edge is trivial. That’s crucial when you’re talking about rolling out 100+ international locations. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 14

Rapid Deployment, Complete Visibility After some initial testing, Ng decided to roll out Cato. The deployment began with a handful of stores, but then was expanded to the rest of the network. Deployment has exceeded his expectations. “We were able to deploy two to three stores per day!” he says. Converging his entire security and networking infrastructure has made management easier. Hooking up all my stores in eight countries and being able to precisely and clearly manage them from a single dashboard was a major win for going with Cato.” Unlike a managed service, Cato Cloud allows him to configure and change security as necessary. “Before security management was tedious and slow. Now, we can implement policies immediately by ourselves,” he says. Part of that has to do with simplicity and sophistication of security interface. “I liked the complete visibility of our security on the fantastic dashboard,” he says, “A security dashboard must be clear and easy to manage. Cato got this one right.” As a result, security has improved. “Before we were vulnerable and web access was wide open. Now we have tight control,” he says. Before we were vulnerable and web access was wide open. Now we have tight control. Every project faces deployment challenges. But the Cato team has been very responsive, and they work well with my team. People were another key success factor in choosing Cato.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 15

Cato: Good Enough to Recommend to a Friend Looking forward, he’s anticipating connecting the rest of his locations to Cato Cloud. Many of those locations are franchises, which can normally be problematic for retail IT teams as they lack control over the franchisee’s infrastructure. “It’s not an issue with Cato Cloud,” he says. We control all of the security and networking policy infrastructure. They only need an Internet connection and deploy the Cato appliance, which we’ve proven to be ridiculously easy.” Overall, he says his experience has been “awesome” working with Cato. “It’s been a fast and painless implementation with a friendly and responsive service team. I would recommend Cato to a friend and that’s a big deal for me to say.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 16

Global Food Supplier Uses Cato Cloud to Ensure Global Performance, Security and High Availability MPLS Migration to SD-WAN • Optimized Global Connectivity • Affordable MPLS Alternative • Secure Branch Internet Access Cloud Acceleration and Control • Global Enterprise • Remote Access Security and Optimization The Challenge: Improve Network About Global Security and Availability Without Food Supplier Compromising Performance or Based in the Netherlands, BrandLoyalty provides Agility winning loyalty campaigns by connecting high- Manufacturers know all too well the pains of relying heavily on frequency retailers, global VPNs. They might be more cost-effective than MPLS, but our partners, and performance is very unpredictable, and setting up numerous VPN shoppers. BrandLoyalty connections, is too time consuming. And none of that touches on the fully supports the retailer’s problem of providing local security. journey, from strategy to solution and execution. These were precisely the challenges facing Global Food Supplier. The company, which asked to be anonymous, develops and delivers healthy feed solutions for fish. It operates 31 manufacturing facilities and offices across Europe and the UK, in Central and South America, Tasmania, and now in China. Prior to coming to Cato, the company ran its own network, connecting locations primarily via a VPN between on-site firewall appliances. Some MPLS links were used to connect several sites. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 17

As the company matured, it grew through acquisitions, and with that came the need to update its connectivity and security options. The impending expiration of many of the sites’ license-support for the firewalls drove the company to reassess its security approach. The existing firewalls lacked the capacity to meet the company’s needs and would have required massive upgrades. Otherwise, the company would have had to disable critical services, such as virus scanning and SSL traffic scanning. The company knew it needed to enable advanced security globally, but the cost to do so with firewall appliances was very high. Availability was another critical concern. High availability was only set up in offices in a few countries, leaving the remaining locations exposed with single points of failure. What’s more, the company had little visibility into the network’s operations. If users had performance issues, or worse, the site experienced a network failure, the IT team lacked the insight to know what was going wrong. And as more applications began moving into the cloud, the company needed additional solutions for WAN optimization, and to reduce latency for applications such as SharePoint, team collaboration, email and M3 (ERP). Cato’s SASE Platform Provides Signi昀椀cant Advantages The company’s IT team made the pitch to executive management: standardize on Cato Networks’ global solution to benefit from several advantages. First, every site would be configured for high availability by installing redundant, cost-effective Cato Sockets, Cato’s edge SD-WAN appliances. Second, advanced security is fully converged into Cato’s SASE platform. The company’s network would be continuously monitored and scanned to detect suspicious traffic. Global performance was also key. Cato includes WAN optimization in its global private backbone. By contrast, the existing VPN offered very poor performance in several countries, especially China, Costa Rica, Chile and Ecuador, due to its dependence on the public Internet. This made access to global systems like Office 365 and M3 almost useless. Network visibility was another advantage offered by Cato. The company would now have deep insight into the performance of all last mile connections. Cato provides real-time and historical graphs for throughput, latency, jitter, and packet loss. The company would also have centralized management 24×7 support and monitoring. Finally, there were the cost savings of going with Cato. With Cato’s global private backbone, the company would be able to eliminate all MPLS circuits. And with Cato running security in the cloud, the company would avoid hardware upgrades of its legacy firewalls. Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 18

How Going with Cato Led to Consistent Performance and Security Worldwide The company wanted a single global solution that could connect and secure all offices and production facilities in a consistent manner. Also, the company lacked internal expertise to support this network, so an external technology partner was needed to make configuration changes and keep the network running. We had some discussions about going with a global MPLS solution, but we knew we would always end up somehow with more than one supplier and multiple points of contact because of all the countries we are in.” “We had some discussions about going with a global MPLS solution,” says the IT manager, “but we ruled out that option because even though we would theoretically get one supplier, we knew we would always end up somehow with more than one supplier and multiple points of contact because of all the countries we are in.” Cato also allowed the company to eliminate all the branch firewalls and VPN connections. Cato Cloud is an affordable MPLS alternative, connecting all branches, trusted business partners, and physical and cloud data centers with an SLA-backed, affordable global backbone. The company’s remote locations connect to the company’s systems via redundant Cato Sockets; remote users connect through the Cato client. With all WAN and Internet traffic consolidated in the cloud, Cato applies a set of security services to protect all traffic at all times. Firewall and other security rules are now centralized in Cato Cloud, so they are easy to manage and automatically updated by Cato. “It’s good to get the automated client and security updates from Cato,” says the IT manager. “We didn’t have updates from our firewall vendor—ever. Now we have everything updated centrally by Cato. This ensures we always have the latest features enabled to protect our network.” Once we began our pilot with Cato, we saw that it is much, much easier for us to get high- level support from Cato than we could ever get with our legacy 昀椀rewall provider.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 19

Support also stood out for him. “One of the best parts of our relationship with Cato is the level of support we receive,” he says. “Once we began our pilot with Cato, we saw that it is much, much easier for us to get high-level support from Cato than we could ever get with our legacy firewall provider, even after 15 years with them. They just didn’t care about us, but Cato is very attentive to our needs. We can talk directly to the people who will get our business needs implemented.” Future Looks Brighter with Cato’s Advanced Analytics Looking toward the future, the company’s IT team plans to set up advanced segmentation of its network and to set priorities for its various applications. “We are looking at how much bandwidth is used by different applications and will use policies to prioritize what’s most important to us,” he says. “With all the insight and visibility we get from Cato, we’re confident we can optimize our bandwidth usage to get even more benefits from our network.” With all the insight and visibility we get from Cato, we’re con昀椀dent we can optimize our bandwidth usage to get even more bene昀椀ts from our network.” Cato. Ready for Whatever’s Next Case Studies - Retail 20