What Enterprises Say about Cato’s SD-WAN

Marketers have their brochures; engineers have their test reports, but nothing is more compelling when selecting an SD-WAN than real-life experience. The “proof” truly is “in the pudding,” as they say.

Today’s blog takes a look at some challenges real customers faced with their WAN infrastructure, and how Cato Networks was able to help.

Paysafe Group

Both executives and users were frustrated with being unable to access corporate resources when visiting different Paysafe offices. A productive and functioning user mobility platform became a strategic focal point.

Paysafe decided to replace its mix of MPLS and Internet-based VPN with Cato Cloud to create a single converged network. For a fraction of the price, the Cato Cloud solution improved in performance compared to the Internet VPNs and is on par with MPLS. Paysafe’s Infrastructure Architect, Stuart Gall, comments “During our testing, we found latency from Cambridge to Montreal to be 45% less with Cato Cloud than with the public Internet, making Cato performance comparable to MPLS.”

Pet Lovers

With over 100 stores and franchises connected with Internet-based VPNs, Pet Lovers had security concerns as only the datacenter and four stores had firewall protection in place. Adding firewalls and other security appliances at each store was too expensive, slow to deploy, and would be difficult to manage. Although MPLS was considered as a possible solution, they decided it would be too expensive and too slow to deploy.

David Whye Tye Ng, the CEO and executive director at Pet Lovers, made to decision to go with Cato Cloud. The solution appealed to Ng because in addition to aggregating traffic from all locations into a common SD-WAN, the solution includes FWaaS (firewall as a service) so they could secure every location without deploying firewall appliances. “Hooking up all my stores in eight countries and being able to precisely and clearly manage them from a single dashboard was a major win for going with Cato,” he says.

DSM Sinochem Pharmaceuticals (DSP)

The IT team at DSP was facing several problems that needed to be addressed. Their 10-site global MPLS network was congested, the end-user experience was slow, the MPLS network was expensive, and moving locations took 3-4 months.

Matthieu Cijsouw, Global IT Manager, and his team were able to transition to Cato Cloud in about one month, with actual cutovers taking approximately 30 minutes. The solution reduced costs while increasing bandwidth. According to Cijsouw, the performance to their office in China now works equally or “even better” than with MPLS. He summarized his experience: “Product delivery, support have all been there. With Cato Cloud, not only did I receive a more agile infrastructure, but I also received an agile partner who can keep up with my needs. We operate faster because of Cato.”

Fisher & Company

Fisher had a complex global MPLS network that faced challenges including high costs, limited bandwidth, backhauling that created a single point of failure and a fractured management platform that made administration of MPLS and security a painful process.

Fisher turned to Cato’s SD-WAN service with an affordable, global, SLA-backed backbone. Although drastically cutting costs, application delivery actually improved. Systems Manager Kevin McDaid notes, “Users definitely feel it in their user experience. Things like screen refreshes of our ERP system, seem to be a lot quicker with Cato.” Additionally, Fisher now has control and visibility of the network and security infrastructure from just one interface.

Alewijnse

Alewijnse had an MPLS mesh network with a datacenter and ten other sites with three other locations connected via Internet VPN. Issues of poor Internet and cloud performance, MPLS costs, security, and IT agility prompted the manager of ICT, Willem-Jan Herckenrath, to consider other options.

The search for a simpler WAN design that addressed security and mobile concerns as well as reduces costs led them to Cato Cloud. The increased bandwidth and elimination of the Internet backhaul improved Internet performance. “With Cato, we got the functionality of SD-WAN, a global backbone, and security service for our sites and mobile users, integrated together and at a fraction of the cost,” Herckenrath says.

FD Mediagroep (FDMG)

With many journalists working in physical offices as well as in the field, FDMG had a complex network of MPLS and remote access solutions. Maintaining separate security policies for fixed and mobile users and cost and scaling limitations of MPLS were among the problems they were facing.

Jerry Cyrus, Technical Team Leader and Information Security Officer (ISO), says although the initial goal was to reduce WAN costs, the value in other aspects were achieved when moving to Cato Cloud. “We’re spending about 10 percent less with Cato than with MPLS,” says Cyrus. “Our savings are even greater if we factor in the licensing, installation, and management costs associated with the VPN concentrator…With Cato Cloud, I increased bandwidth, replaced two things with one solution, improved user experience, maintained performance and uptime, and made IT more agile. That’s what I call a huge win.”

W&W-AFCO Steel

As the company grew, the structural steel fabricator realized the Internet-based VPN network was becoming increasingly ineffective. With an office in the US, India, and remote-based ad hoc project teams, essential tasks over the network either were painfully slow or just wouldn’t work at all because the latency, on average, would reach 150ms.

An MPLS solution was determined to be too expensive of a solution, so they turned to SD-WAN with Cato. Vice President, Todd Park, appreciates the agile infrastructure and improved performance. “Cato firewall is much easier to manage than a traditional firewall and the mobile client was much easier to deploy and configure than our existing approach,” he says. Latency improved to averages of “50 to 70 milliseconds,” he says. And with Cato, they can now block web browsing, downloads, or other applications from interfering with site performance.

To learn more about Cato Cloud, register for a demo today.