Cato Networks adds a Digital Experience Monitoring service to its SASE platform

Since it was founded in 2015, Cato Networks has evangelized the concept of a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform that combines many of the features of software-defined networking, modern network security tools, and endpoint protection into a single service backed by a global private network. The promise here is that instead of managing dozens of different networking and security tools, a cloud-native SASE provider like Cato can now offer IT all these tools under a single umbrella, allowing those teams to be more agile.

Now, the company is expanding its platform with the addition of a Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) service.

DEM is not a new concept, of course. At its core, it combines application performance management (APM), which measures how applications and the services they rely on perform from a technical point of view, and data from real users and devices to provide insights into how users perceive the performance of a given service. That means when an IT team gets complaints from an enterprise employee about the performance of a line-of-business application, for example, a DEM solution allows them to pinpoint if the issue is their Wi-Fi network or internet connection, a specific service, or the application itself.

Founded by Check Point co-founder Shlomo Kramer and Incapsula co-founder Gur Shatz, Cato was last valued at over $3 billion. As Kramer told me in an interview ahead of today’s announcement, the idea of adding a DEM service came naturally to Cato, given that it was always meant to be a platform play.

“The idea here is to reduce — or stop — the bleeding of the IT security budget as part of IT security […] and provide better security to the entire pyramid of enterprises — and not only for the tip of the pyramid, which is the traditional point products approach and portfolio companies that consolidate the successful point product startups,” Kramer told me. “At the tip of that is Palo Alto [Networks], the portfolio company, but delivering that to the entire pyramid that can’t afford all these point products and [Enterprise License Agreements] and integrations. The answer is, as we all know now, a platform. That’s Wiz in the cloud, and CrowdStrike on the endpoint, and Cato on the network side.”

Kramer, who was an early investor in Palo Alto Networks, doesn’t shy away from comparing his own portfolio company with Cato, describing Palo Alto as a “great second-generation company,” and Cato as one of the two main players in this field. He does acknowledge that while the concept of SASE is becoming mainstream, it isn’t quite there yet, “because many people think that SASE is going to continue to live side by side with the appliances and the cloud proxies,” as he described it.

Since it’s so core to a company’s network, it’s maybe no surprise that Cato is now expanding to DEM as well. Indeed, Kramer said that this feature — though he may have still called it application performance management back then, was on the company’s earliest roadmap.

“[Cato DEM] has the broadest data set, the broadest context, because we have the entire end-to-end picture available to us in real time. You would need to build a very complicated point product in order to do that — and we got it in 1/10th of the time of anybody else because the platform provided it for us,” Kramer explained.

With Cato DEM, the company says, it will get easier and faster for IT teams to exactly pinpoint where network problems affect the user experience. This includes visibility from the Wi-Fi network to the network edge. Cato continuously monitors the network and alerts the affected teams when there are issues.

Since it uses the same AI engines under the hood as some of Cato’s other products, users can also query the database in natural language, but maybe more importantly, when there is an issue, it can automatically generate ‘stories’ for these teams that lay out in detail where (and maybe why) the issue occurred.

“If you can make a decision based on data from the client to the network to the application, all available in real time, you’re making a better decision and you are alerting only if you need to,” Kramer said. “If you are now collecting all this data in a data lake, and hunting for patterns over time that look suspicious, and we tell you a story, then that story is valuable.”

Cato’s new DEM service is now available as a paid add-on to all of its 2,500+ customers.