
Inside Cato’s SASE Architecture: A Blueprint for Modern Security
🕓 January 26, 2025
In today’s globally connected business landscape, having a reliable and secure network backbone is essential. Traditional networks often rely on the public internet, which can introduce latency, downtime, and security vulnerabilities. Cato Networks offers a powerful alternative through its global backbone—a dedicated network infrastructure that serves as the engine behind Cato’s Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution. This backbone enables seamless, low-latency connectivity across regions while ensuring a secure and resilient network for organizations worldwide.
Cato’s global backbone is designed to offer consistent, high-speed connectivity across continents. Here’s how this global network helps organizations achieve local security with global reach.
Cato’s global backbone is built with multiple secure Points of Presence (PoPs) for global connectivity. These PoPs are interconnected through high-performance links, creating a private network that routes traffic along the fastest and most secure paths. This infrastructure reduces latency for remote users and provides a consistent experience regardless of location.
By bypassing the unpredictable nature of the public internet, Cato’s backbone ensures reliable and low-latency connectivity. This is especially valuable for organizations with a distributed workforce, as employees can access cloud resources, applications, and internal systems with minimal delay.
Cato’s backbone is engineered with redundancy and failover capabilities, ensuring continuous uptime. If one PoP or link encounters an issue, traffic is automatically rerouted to avoid disruption, minimizing downtime and improving reliability.
Resilience is at the core of Cato’s backbone design. Here’s how Cato achieves a resilient network architecture:
Unlike traditional Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) networks, which can be costly and inflexible, Cato’s backbone provides an alternative that’s agile, scalable, and cost-effective. Businesses can benefit from MPLS-level reliability and performance without the high costs, while still being able to scale their network infrastructure as needed.
Cato’s backbone doesn’t just focus on performance—it’s also equipped with security features. Traffic traversing the backbone is continuously monitored for potential threats, and real-time threat prevention tools, such as Firewall as a Service (FWaaS) and Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), help safeguard data.
Every PoP on Cato’s backbone includes integrated security features, including Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA). This ensures that data remains protected as it moves across the network, providing end-to-end security from the user to the application.
The global backbone is more than just a network infrastructure; it’s the foundation that enables the full capabilities of Cato’s SASE solution. Here’s how it supports SASE efficiency:
The architecture of Cato’s backbone consists of various components that work together to create a resilient, secure, and high-performance network.
The Cato SPACE Engine is a core component of Cato Networks’ SASE architecture, designed to optimize network and security processing. Here’s an overview of its key functions:
Comprehensive Visibility and Control: With SPACE, IT teams gain real-time visibility into network and security events across the entire network, allowing for more effective monitoring, troubleshooting, and policy management.
The SPACE Engine essentially enables Cato’s SASE platform to deliver scalable, efficient, and robust security processing, meeting the demands of modern, cloud-centric networks while reducing complexity and improving performance.
Traditional networks often rely on MPLS and VPNs, which can introduce limitations in terms of scalability, cost, and flexibility. Here’s a comparison of Cato’s global backbone with traditional models:
Feature | Traditional Network Models | Cato’s Global Backbone | |
Connectivity | Public internet and MPLS | Private, global backbone | |
Scalability | Limited and costly | Easily scalable, cloud-native | |
Latency and Performance | High latency for remote users | Low-latency, optimized connectivity | |
Management Complexity | Requires multiple solutions | Centralized, unified management | |
Security | Separate tools for security | Integrated, end-to-end security |
Cato’s backbone offers a unified solution that reduces latency, improves security, and lowers costs, making it a superior alternative for modern organizations.
Implementing Cato’s global backbone provides several tangible benefits for businesses:
Cato’s global backbone stands as a powerful and reliable solution for modern organizations, offering low-latency, secure, and scalable connectivity across continents. Furthermore, Cato’s backbone not only enhances user experience and reduces costs but also provides a unified, centralized management platform, making it a superior alternative to traditional network models.
The global backbone provides secure, high-performance connectivity across regions, enabling low-latency access to applications and cloud services.
Cato’s backbone includes integrated security features, such as FWaaS, Secure Web Gateway (SWG), and CASB, ensuring that data remains secure as it travels across the network.
Yes, Cato’s backbone optimizes connectivity to major cloud service providers, providing consistent performance across multi-cloud environments.
Cato’s Global Backbone is a private, cloud-native network infrastructure composed of strategically located Points of Presence (PoPs) worldwide. It offers optimized, low-latency, and secure connectivity for enterprise traffic, providing reliable access to on-premises, cloud, and internet resources.
Unlike the public internet, Cato’s Global Backbone is a private network with managed connections that reduce latency and packet loss. The backbone optimizes performance, ensuring secure and consistent connectivity, especially for mission-critical applications.
Cato deploys PoPs worldwide to bring security and network services closer to users. Each PoP performs local processing for network traffic, reducing latency and providing faster, more reliable connections.
The Global Backbone routes traffic over the most efficient paths using dynamic routing, bypassing public internet congestion. This results in lower latency, faster data transfer, and an improved user experience for applications, especially those hosted in the cloud.
Yes, Cato’s backbone is designed for high availability and redundancy. The PoPs are interconnected with multiple tier-1 providers, ensuring automatic failover and rerouting of traffic in case of a network disruption, maintaining seamless connectivity.
Cato’s backbone includes application-aware routing that prioritizes traffic based on application requirements. It allocates bandwidth dynamically, optimizing performance for real-time applications like VoIP and video conferencing.
Cato’s backbone includes security services such as firewall, SWG, and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) within each PoP, providing secure access and threat prevention for all traffic passing through the backbone.
Yes, all data transmitted across Cato’s Global Backbone is encrypted end-to-end, ensuring data privacy and protection against interception. This encryption meets enterprise security standards and compliance requirements.
Absolutely. Cato’s backbone is cloud-native, allowing it to scale easily as your business grows. Whether adding new locations, increasing users, or integrating new applications, the backbone provides scalable connectivity without requiring physical upgrades.
With PoPs globally, Cato’s backbone offers secure, optimized access for remote workers by connecting them to the nearest PoP. This reduces latency and improves performance for distributed teams accessing centralized resources.
MJ is the Lead Solutions Architect & Technology Consultant at FSD-Tech. He has 20+ years of experience in IT Infrastructure & Digital Transformation. His Interests are in Next-Gen IT Infra Solutions like SASE, SDN, OCP, Hybrid & Multi-Cloud Solutions.
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