Business Continuity at Difficult Times of War in Israel

As reported in global news, on October 7th, 2023, the Hamas terror organization has launched a brutal attack on Israeli cities and villages, with thousands of civilian casualties, forcing Israel to enter a state of war with Hamas-controlled Gaza.

While Cato Networks is a global company with 850+ employees in over 30 countries around the world, a significant part of our business and technical operations is based out of Tel Aviv, Israel.

The following blog details the actions we are taking based on our Business Continuity Procedures (BCP), adjusted to the current scenario, to ensure the continuity of our services that support our customers’ and partners’ critical network and security infrastructure.

Business Continuity by Design

Our SASE service was built from the ground up as a fully distributed cloud-native solution. One of the key benefits of our solution architecture is that it does not have a single point of failure. Our operations teams have built and trained AI engines to identify signals of performance or availability degradation in the service and respond to them autonomously.

This is part of our day-to-day cloud operations, and as a result, downtime in one or more of our PoPs does not disrupt our customers’ operations. Our SASE Cloud high-availability and self-healing have already been put to the test before, and proved itself.

Our stock of Sockets has always been globally distributed across warehouses in North America, Europe and APJ. All our warehouses are fully stocked, and no shortage or long lead times is expected. In fact, we have been able to overcome global supply chain challenges before.

24x7x365 Support

Our support organization is designed to always be there for our 2000+ enterprise customers, where and when they need us. We are committed to ensure that support availability to our customers remains intact even during adverse conditions like an armed conflict or a pandemic.

We operate a global support organization from the United States, Canada, Colombia, United Kingdom, Northern Ireland, The Netherlands, Israel, Poland, Ukraine, Macedonia, Singapore, Philippines and Japan. All teams work in concert to deliver a 24/7/365 follow-the-sun service, making sure no support tickets are left unattended.

Customers who require support should continue to contact us through our standard support channels, and will continue to receive the support levels they expect and deserve.

BCP Activation in Israel

The Cato SASE service is ISO 27001 and SOC2 certified as well as additional, global standards.

A mandatory part of such certifications is to have Business Continuity Procedures (BCP) in place, practice them periodically, and improve or fine-tune as needed.

Our BCP was not only tested synthetically, but was successfully activated during the COVID-19 epidemic. In March 2020, we moved our entire staff to work remotely. Using the ZTNA capabilities of Cato SASE Cloud, the transition was smooth, and no customers experienced any impact on the service availability, performance, and support.

We have now re-activated the same BCP for our staff in Israel. Our technical organizations are able to securely connect remotely to our engineering, support, and DevOps systems and continue their work safely from their homes.

Beyond BCP

In the current situation, we are taking additional steps to further our increase our resiliency.

October 8th, 2023:

We have extended shifts of our support teams in APJ to reinforce the teams in EMEA.

We have assigned T3 support engineers to T1 and T2 teams to ensure our support responsiveness continues to meet and exceed customers’ expectations.

October 10th, 2023:

We have temporarily relocated select executives and engineers to Athens, Greece. We now have HQ and engineering resources available to support our global staff and cloud operations even in extreme cases of long power or internet outages, which aren’t expected at this time.

The Way Forward

Israel had faced difficult times and armed conflicts in the past, and always prevailed. We stand behind our Catonians in Israel and their families and care for them during this conflict. Our success is built on the commitment of our people to excellence in all facets of the business. This commitment remains firm as we continue our mission to provide a rock-solid secure foundation for our customers’ most critical business infrastructure.