News

Cato Networks Tool Combines Security with SD-WAN

• By David Ramel
• 12/13/2019

Cato Networks, an enterprise networking and security specialist, has combined security and software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN) technology in its new Cato Instant*Insight offering.

The Tel Aviv-based company said the product marks the first time that security information and event management (SIEM) capabilities have been included at no cost in a secure access service edge (SASE) platform. SASE, a term popularized by research firm Gartner Inc., refers to the convergence of functions like network and security point solutions into a unified, global cloud-native service.

The company said its new Cato Instant*Insight addresses the typically fragmented views of networks available to IT, which require data normalization and interpretation techniques to store event data in a common format suitable for analytics so organizations can conduct advanced root cause anslysis without incurring typical costs or experiencing problems associated with SIEM tools.

"Cato Instant*Insight addresses these problems by organizing the millions of networking and security events tracked by Cato into a single, queryable timeline," the company said in a news release this week. "IT teams can quickly filter the millions of networking and security events tracked by Cato to arrive at root cause."

One scenario involves using the tool to easily diagnose root cause of intermittent problems -- including periodic loss of connectivity -- which normally would require extensive event logging that's unavailable in most edge routers. "Cato Instant*Insight lets network administrators filter through millions of events across their global networks in seconds to uncover the cause of connectivity problems," the company said.

Furthermore, the 2015 startup said its new offering revolutionizes the challenges of delivering SIEM capabilities in three ways:

• Automated aggregation consolidates all security and networking events into one massive data warehouse without any effort. No additional agents are needed to extract, or code required to normalize data.
• Faceted search makes Cato Instant*Insight very adaptable and still easy to use. All variables and parameters are presented for easy querying. Network and security professionals simply select the requisite items to construct the necessary queries.
• The network analysis workbench is a built-in interface for data mining. There's no need to purchase an additional data analysis tool to piece together the timeline of networking and security problems. Instant*Insight correlates all events into a single timeline, filtered through this simple interface.

"I'm very impressed with Instant*Insight,” Cato quoted Tomy Joseph, director of IT Infrastructure at Coolsys, described as a leader in the commercial refrigeration and HVAC industry, as saying. “We can use it right away to troubleshoot all sorts of problems, like our VoIP disconnects or security incidents, by mining a massive repository of security and networking data."