Cato Networks extends SASE platform with digital experience monitoring

Cato Networks today introduced digital experience monitoring (DEM) capabilities that will augment the company’s cloud SASE platform with application traffic and network performance data that IT operations teams need to optimize end-user experiences.

Cato DEM extends Cato’s capabilities beyond the traditional secure access service edge (SASE) platform by monitoring and analyzing data across application and network traffic. DEM augments Cato Cloud SASE with insights to improve application performance for end users and customers, in addition to the network and security data the platform covers. Cato had previously added extended detection and response (XDR) and endpoint protection platform (EPP) capabilities to its cloud-based SASE solution.

“We see DEM as a crucial component of the future SASE landscape, but only with the right platform,” said Shamus McGillicuddy, vice president of research at Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), in a statement. “User experience is a primary currency for evaluating IT effectiveness, and building DEM on the right SASE platform will help ensure great user experiences. But to deliver on that mission, the SASE platform must provide visibility into all applications, offer ways to fix user experience problems with those applications, and have the necessary real user traffic insights for accurate analysis.”

Cato’s platform can not only identify these performance issues, but it can also optimize the network flow and performance end-to-end because Cato’s platform can control the traffic across the entire network.

Cato DEM uses native probes across its global private backbone to monitor the various components of an end-user connection, including the Wi-Fi router, LAN devices, and the application itself. The platform relies on a combination of real-time and synthetic monitoring. Network flow data is collected into a data lake, and AI models analyze this data to establish baselines for normal performance and behavior. The AI can then detect anomalies in network performance and user behavior compared to the baselines, according to Cato Networks.

Because Cato controls the network, it can take action to optimize the network flow and improve end-user experience when performance issues are identified.

“We give customers hop-by-hop visibility with real-time user traffic [and we also use] synthetic probes, so [we’re] looking at actual traffic going across the network, identifying and quantifying what that performance looks like, and then monitoring with synthetic probes what that network performance looks like offline,” explains Brian Anderson, Global Field CTO at Cato Networks. “We can use that combination to identify anomalies in your network and give the customer tools to help optimize that in real time.”

Cato SASE Cloud runs on a private global backbone of more than 90+ points of presence (PoP) connected via multiple SLA-backed network providers. The PoPs software continuously monitors the providers for latency, packet loss, and jitter to determine in real-time the best route for every packet. Cato applies optimization and acceleration to all traffic going through the backbone to enhance application performance and the user experience. To ensure all locations benefit, Cato optimizes traffic from all the edges and toward all destinations, on-premises and in the cloud.

Cato DEM is available now, and customers can enable the new capabilities by adding a license, with no additional installation required. The DEM features are natively available across Cato’s Cloud SASE platform.

Read more about SASE

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• Why is the transition from SD-WAN to SASE so painful? The transition from software-defined WAN to secure access service edge is proving to be difficult for many enterprises, according to new research from Enterprise Management Associates.
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