Cato claims SASE speed barrier record to sites and the cloud | Computer Weekly

The push towards cloud has created more demands on business networks, in particular how secure and effective they are, and aiming to address these needs, Cato Networks has announced a secure access service edge (SASE) throughput record, achieving 5Gbps on a single encrypted tunnel with all security inspections enabled, as well as introducing cloud cross-connect technology enabling high-speed, SLA-backed, direct connectivity into nearly any worldwide cloud provider.

The single-vendor SASE platform provider believes both capabilities – the first of which is said to quintuple the throughput of the nearest SASE competitor without requiring hardware upgrades – underscore the value of a fully cloud-native platform and extend SASE to meet the needs of today’s large, cloud-centric enterprise.

As larger enterprises adopt SASE, higher capacity connections are needed for interconnecting datacentres and private clouds. Cato sees itself as being able to meet that need with industry-leading support for 5Gbps throughput on a single, encrypted tunnel regardless of security inspections. Previously, Cato supported a maximum of 3Gbps per tunnel.

The improved throughput is also said to underscore the benefits of a cloud-native architecture. Cato nearly doubled the performance of the Cato Socket, its edge software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) device, without requiring any hardware changes. This is said to have been possible only because the computer runs the compute-intensive operations that normally degrade edge appliance performance – such as packet encryption/decryption, security inspection – in the Cato Single Pass Processing Engine (SPACE) running across points of presence (PoPs).

Through the act of improving SPACE, Cato said all edges connected to the SASE Cloud gain increased throughput. Replacement of the Cato Socket is not required.

By contrast, it said SASE solutions implemented as virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud or modified web proxies remain limited to under 1Gbps of throughput for a single tunnel. This limitation is seen by Cato as forcing enterprises to have their edge appliance create and manage multiple tunnels and load-balance traffic between them – an added layer of complexity and risk that does not exist in the new solution.

“Cato has set the mark for SASE at scale,” commented Gur Shatz, co-founder, president and chief operating officer of Cato Networks. “Pushing the boundary of SASE throughput worldwide is more than an engineering achievement – it demonstrates how quickly a platform with a cloud-native architecture can make new technology globally available.”

As it was announcing the new benchmark in throughput, Cato also announced that it would be delivering 5Gbps connections to other cloud providers. The new Cato cross-connect is designed to enable private, high-speed Layer 2 connections between Cato and any other cloud provider connecting to the Equinix Cloud Exchange (ECX) or Digital Reality.

Along with interconnecting their enterprise cloud and non-cloud resources, the cross-connect also enables the company’s channel partners to deliver SSE 360 into legacy deployments by establishing a network-to-network interface into the Cato SASE Cloud. Enterprises with multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) or third-party SD-WAN infrastructure can now use the new capabilities without changing their underlying networks.