Cato Networks has announced the opening of its Marseilles point of presence (PoP), the twentieth Cato PoP in EMEA. With the new PoP, Cato extends enterprise-grade threat prevention, data protection, and global traffic optimisation to the sites and users in Southern France. And with PoPs in Paris and Marseilles, Cato adds PoP-level redundancy across France. The new PoP is part of the company’s broader strategy of extending the Cato SASE Cloud and optimising global connectivity across the globe.
“With the rise of ransomware, cyberthreats, and the need for secure and optimised, global application access, Cato has seen strong demand for our cloud-native SASE platform,” says Luca Simonelli, Vice President of EMEA sales, “The Marseilles PoP helps meet that demand extending the reach of the Cato SASE Cloud while extending the cloud platform’s resiliency within France. The expansion is just part of our strategic plan to continue investing in the EMEA region.”
“Before Cato, there were outages, complaints, and negative feedback from several internal teams about the service from our major international MPLS provider,” said Thomas Chejfec, Group CIO of Haulotte, a global manufacturer of materials and people lifting equipment. Haulotte moved to Cato after facing three years of delays and cost overruns, rolling out MPLS to its more than 30 offices across Western Europe, North America, South America, Africa, and the Asia Pacific. “Since deploying Cato, the network is no longer a topic of discussion with users,” says Chejfec. “We never hear about it anymore.”
Today’s enterprises need to provide users everywhere with secure, optimised access to corporate resources in private data centres, in the cloud, and on the Internet. Cato meets those needs from anywhere without compromising performance or availability.
The Cato SASE Cloud delivers a full suite of converged security capabilities — Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), IPS as a Service, and Next Generation Anti-malware (NGAM). All available from 70+ PoPs worldwide, servicing 150+ countries, and interconnected by Cato’s global private backbone that uses built-in WAN optimisation to far outperform legacy MPLS services.
Cato’s architecture is fully self-healing. Every PoP is interconnected by multiple tier-1 carriers and co-located within the same physical data centres as the leading cloud providers. The PoPs run multiple, multi-core compute nodes, with each core running the Cato’s Single Pass Cloud Engine (SPACE), Cato’s converged, cloud-native software capable of processing up to 3 Gbps of traffic per site with full decryption and all security engines active. Every PoP runs hundreds of Cato SPACEs.
Should a data centre hosting a Cato PoP fail, users and resources automatically reconnect to the next available PoP as all PoPs are equipped with enough surplus capacity to accommodate additional load. A case in point was the recent Interxion datacenter outage. The datacenter housed the London Metal Exchange and Cato’s London PoP. The outage disrupted the Exchange for nearly five hours. Cato customers were also impacted – for 30 seconds – as London-connected sites and users automatically and transparently moved over to Cato’s Manchester and Dublin PoPs.
The new Marseilles PoP brings the same level of in-country availability to France. In the event of a datacenter outage in Paris or Marseilles, Cato’s self-healing architecture automatically and transparently moves sites and users to the next best PoP. Should both PoPs fail, users will automatically fail over to one of the 20 Cato PoPs within the EMEA region. And in the event that all Cato PoPs should be unavailable, Cato customer locations will automatically form a network amongst themselves.
