Cato Transforms SD-WAN With Identity-aware Routing

TEL AVIV, Israel, July 18, 2018 /PRNewswire/ --

Routing and prioritizing traffic based on identity simplifies IT operations and enables end-to-end, business-process optimization

Cato Networks, provider of Cato Cloud, the world's first secure, global SD-WAN as a service, introduced the first identity-aware routing engine for SD-WAN. Identity awareness abstracts policy creation from the network and application architecture, enabling business-centric routing policies based on user identity and group affiliation. Identity awareness headlines a series of SD-WAN enhancements Cato is introducing today for Cato Cloud.

"We founded Cato on the premise that IT needed a new kind of carrier, one where simplicity isn't just a mission statement but part of the company's DNA," says Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato Networks. "Identity awareness adds business context to our end-to-end, converged and secure MPLS alternative, making it easier and simpler for IT to align with today's dynamic business requirements and deliver an optimal user experience, everywhere."

Identity Awareness Transforms SD-WAN Agility, Visibility, and Usability

Enterprises have long sought to make their networks easier - easier to configure, easier to deploy and easier to manage. Essential to that goal has been abstracting network policy definition to better mirror business context.

Routing policies across legacy networks were machine-aware, requiring IP addressing information that bore little resemblance to the business. SD-WANs popularized application-aware routing policies, bringing us closer to reflecting business context in our networks. Identity-aware routing completes this evolution by utilizing organizational entities. With identity awareness, networking and security policies can direct traffic or restrict resource access based on team, department, and individual users.

Cato implements identity-aware routing seamlessly without changing the network infrastructure or the way users work. Cato dynamically correlates Microsoft Active Directory (AD) data, across distributed AD repositories, and real-time AD login events to associate a unique identity with every packet flow. Organizational context, such as groups and business units, is derived from the AD hierarchy.