Cato Networks opens Copenhagen point of presence

Cato Networks has opened a Copenhagen point of presence (PoP), its 20th such site in Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) and its second in the Nordics. Cato recently opened a similar facility in Marseilles as part of its broader strategy to extend its secure access service edge (SASE) cloud and optimise global connectivity.

Cato believes that the new PoP further extends enterprise-grade threat prevention, data protection and global traffic optimisation to sites and users across Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Norway. The new PoP in the Danish capital is set up to provide the complete range of Cato capabilities, with sites and remote users connecting to the facilities able to gain access to optimised worldwide connectivity, outperforming applications operating across MPLS services and the internet.

Cato security capabilities are designed to protect sites and remote users regardless of whether they are accessing resources across the internet or the WAN. Cato security capabilities include zero-trust network access, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker, firewall as a service, IPS as a service, and next-generation anti-malware. 

The Copenhagen PoP is designed for high availability and scalability, running multiple, multi-core compute nodes. Each core runs Cato’s Single Pass Cloud Engine (SPACE), the company’s converged, cloud-native software that is capable of processing up to 3Gbps of traffic per site with decryption and all security engines active. Cato SPACEs in the PoP are designed to enable resilient and load-balanced support of thousands of customers’ edges and multi-gigabit traffic streams. Multiple tier-1 carriers connect the Copenhagen PoP to the rest of Cato’s 70-plus PoPs, connecting customers in more than 150 countries to the Cato Global Private Backbone.

Cato said that if the datacentre hosting the Copenhagen PoP fails, users and resources automatically and transparently reconnect to the Stockholm PoP or the nearest optimal PoP. To illustrate how it can handle such scenarios, 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 its Manchester and Dublin PoPs.

Luca Simonelli, vice-president of EMEA sales at Cato, said: “The wave of cyber attacks targeting Nordic enterprises has only contributed to the demand for effective and efficient ways of protecting users, locations and applications everywhere. The Copenhagen PoP will help Cato further address that need, extending Cato’s cloud-native SASE platform’s resiliency, visibility and optimised performance across the region.”

Jan Jørgensen, IT project leader at Danish paint and related products manufacturer and retailer Flügger Group, commented: “We have much more control of the network, including the ability to monitor and make changes remotely. Before Cato, if a retail store dropped a connection, there wasn’t much we could do. With Cato, we can see the line is working fine and find exactly where the errors are in the system. We can make quick security changes remotely and easily to adapt to new threats.”

The Cato SASE Cloud is available across the Nordics through partners including AddPro, Fujitsu, Iptor and Secher Security, and distributors Ignition and Nuvias.