Cato Networks beefs up SASE offer with Marseilles point of presence

As competition in its fields of software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) and secure access service edge (SASE) increases, Cato Networks has opened a point of presence (PoP) in Marseilles, its 20th such facility in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA).

The new PoP is part of the company’s broader strategy of extending the Cato SASE Cloud and optimising global connectivity across the globe. The company has over 70 PoPs worldwide, servicing over 150 countries, connected by a global private backbone that uses built-in wide-area network (WAN) optimisation to far outperform legacy multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services.  

In addition, the new PoP is designed to allow Cato to extend what it claims is enterprise-grade threat prevention, data protection and global traffic optimisation to the sites and users in southern France. And with PoPs in Paris and Marseilles, Cato will also be adding PoP-level redundancy across France.

“With the rise of ransomware, cyber threats, and the need for secure and optimised global application access, Cato has seen strong demand for our cloud-native SASE platform,” said Luca Simonelli, vice-president of EMEA sales. “The Marseilles PoP helps meet that demand, extending the reach of the Cato SASE Cloud while extending the cloud platform’s resiliency within France. The expansion is just part of our strategic plan to continue investing in the EMEA region.”

Putting the launch into context, Cato noted that enterprises now need to provide users everywhere with secure, optimised access to corporate resources in private datacentres, in the cloud and on the internet.

The Cato SASE Cloud offers converged security capabilities – zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateway (SWG), cloud access security broker (CASB), firewall as a service (FWaaS), intrusion prevention system (IPS) as a service, and next-generation anti-malware (NGAM).

Its PoPs are also interconnected by multiple Tier 1 carriers and colocated in the same physical datacentres as the leading cloud providers. The PoPs run multiple, multi-core compute nodes, with each core running Single Pass Cloud Engine (Space) converged, cloud-native software capable of processing up to 3Gbps of traffic per site with full decryption and all security engines active.

The Marseilles PoP brings in-country availability and resilience to France. In the event of a datacentre’s outage in Paris or Marseilles, the self-healing architecture automatically and transparently moves sites and users to the next best PoP. Should both PoPs fail, users will automatically fail over to one of the 20 Cato PoPs in the EMEA region. And if all Cato PoPs should be unavailable, Cato customer locations will automatically form a network among themselves.

In an example of such capability, Cato pointed to the Interxion datacentre outage that affected the London Metal Exchange for nearly five hours. Cato’s customers were said to be impacted for just 30 seconds as London-connected sites and users automatically and transparently moved over to Cato’s Manchester and Dublin PoPs.

Haulotte, a global manufacturer of lifting equipment, moved to Cato after facing three years of delays and cost overruns, rolling out MPLS to its more than 30 offices across Western Europe, North America, South America, Africa and Asia-Pacific.

Commenting on its new experiences with network reliability, group CIO Thomas Chejfec said: “Before Cato, there were outages, complaints and negative feedback from several internal teams about the service from our major international MPLS provider. Since deploying Cato, the network is no longer a topic of discussion with users. We never hear about it anymore.”