Cato Offers a Free Certification Program to Help Customers and Channel Partners Learn the Fundamentals of SASE

Earlier this week, Cato announced that the 600th graduate has completed the SASE Expert certification program. Business and technical professionals from around the world have sought out high-quality education to attain a baseline level of knowledge of this new approach to networking and security…and for good reason.

Since SASE’s introduction, Gartner has cautioned about the misinformation surrounding the architecture. As Gartner noted in its Hype Cycle for Network Security, 2020 report: “There will be a great deal of slideware and marketecture, especially from incumbents that are ill-prepared for the cloud-based delivery as a service model and the investments required for distributed PoPs. This is a case where software architecture and implementation matters.”

As more vendors announce their service offerings in the SASE arena, enterprise IT professionals and channel partners have grown confused over what constitutes a true SASE platform and how it compares to legacy technologies. Some traditional network vendors have added a security element to their hardware appliances, put them in the cloud, and call it “SASE”—but is it really SASE?

Answering those questions isn’t merely an academic exercise. Understanding if the product fulfills the vision of SASE goes a long way to understanding if the product brings the benefits of SASE.

SASE eliminates the legacy appliances that have made IT so complex. Instead, SASE converges networking and security processing into a global cloud-native platform. As cloud services, SASE architectures are easier to operate, save money, reduce risk, and improve IT agility.

Cato Certification Addresses Market Confusion, Advances Professionals’ Knowledge of SASE

The certification course content explores those architectural differences and provides enterprises and channel partners with a solid basis for understanding the SASE revolution. Curriculum highlights include:

• A detailed explanation of why enterprises need SASE today
• A close look at how Gartner explains the SASE architecture
• How SASE compares with legacy technologies
• Benefits and drawbacks of SASE for channel partners and enterprises
• What constitutes a true SASE platform

Cato’s certification program is for IT leaders of all levels. Recent graduates include enterprise network engineers, C-level executives, and channel partners looking to grasp SASE fundamentals. Participants learn sufficient baseline information to understand the advantages and rationale for SASE for their own company or their clients.

The certification is available online for free. Participants take the courses at their own pace from anywhere in the world. To learn more about the SASE Expert certification program, visit https://www.catonetworks.com/sase/sase-expert-level-1/