IoT Insider was invited to Cato Networks’ breakfast briefing on 19 June, where the company debuted its first managed Secure Access Service Edge (‘MSASE’) Partner Platform, a way for channel partners to deliver and profit from these services, by enabling them to service their customers more effectively.
Cato Networks was founded in 2015 and sells services encompassing their SASE Cloud Platform – and now, their MSASE Partner Platform – to enterprises, who are their end customers. Using the new platform, partners are given capabilities such as managing the complete customer lifecycle from planning through deployment and to production. They also have access to details of their customer accent status such as licence utilisation and expiration, security risk exposure and networking problems.
At the briefing, the Cato Networks team was keen to stress the rate at which the SASE market is growing and in turn, the growth of the company: “Last year, we grew our revenues 59% … when you consider Gartner has pegged the market at less than half of that, this means we’ve grown more than twice as fast as the market,” said Greg Eden, Vice President Communications at Cato.
During the day, IoT Insider heard from experts at Cato Networks and their partners, as Eyal Webber-Zvik, the Vice President of Product Marketing and Strategic Alliances gave a presentation on the SASE market overview; Greg Duffy, Director of Product Marketing spoke on the new Partner Platform itself; a panel brought together Cato Networks and its partners to discuss their SASE journeys; and, wrapping up the briefing, Etay Maor, Chief Security Strategist and Founding Member of Cato’s research team Cato CTRL spoke about threat actors and their use of AI.
Citing research from consulting firm Gartner, the SASE market is expected to grow as 45% of enterprises by 2016 are anticipated to use managed SASE services, marking an increase of three times compared with early 2023 figures.
“Gartner coined the term SASE in 2019, however Cato was founded in 2015 to be exactly what Gartner acknowledged four years later,” explained Webber-Zvik. He spoke in length about what makes up a company’s “DNA”, and said that the DNA of a company delivering a SASE solution must be built with security, network, Cloud and platform capabilities ingrained in its DNA.
Another theme running throughout the day was the importance of simplicity over complexity, partly explaining the reasoning behind Cato’s decision to launch their MSASE Partner Platform. “The reason simplification is so important is that complexity is the enemy of security,” said Duffy in his presentation. “When customers buy SASE today, they’re expecting to see converged services, networking and security together. But that’s not always what they get.”
Later on, during the panel involving Greg Eden from Cato; Ian Bleazard from ASMPT; Mukesh Bavisi from Exponential-e and Frank Rauch, Global Channel Chief from Cato, Bleazard spoke about his experience looking for a solution that would deliver connectivity, latency and a more distributed architecture and said: “I generally use the term, complexity is always very easy, and simplicity is generally hard. And trying to drive simplicity is a lot harder than it is just to let the business get what it wants all the time.”
In the final presentation of the day, Etay Maor took an interesting angle on AI – discussing not how it is being used as a tool to defend cybersecurity, but manipulated by threat actors for nefarious purposes.
One of the main messages of his presentation was that unlike film scenes that depict hacking, often threat actors use a back door and quietly slip in: “People think about hacking as something we do that is ninja-like stuff, but 99% of my time, I find doors that are already open and walk through them – it applies to vulnerabilities, for different holes in security, looking at a network that has siloed point solutions and getting in.”
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