Cato Networks’ Growth and the SASE Industry – Yishay Yovel, Cato Networks

This is Textron TV. Hi everyone. Welcome back to techstrunk TV.

Our next guest here on techstrong TV is you shiao Bell yishai is with Kato. Okay, no networks and look I've been around I've been aware of Kato for a while. Now in the in the security space.

I assume many of you out here have heard of Cato and probably more than a few of you are very familiar with Kato, but just in case not to worry we're gonna First of all, welcome you shy you shy welcome to techstrong TV. Why don't we start with that with Kato? Give us a little background on Cato and maybe a little of your own background.

Okay, so first great to be here so get on networks is an eight year old company. It's a network security startup that his innovated the convergence of networking and security into the cloud. So when we sat down back in 2015, and we looked at the clients World, which are founders came from flomo Kramer is the co-founder of checkpoint a software.

The idea was to take networking and security and deliver them as a cloud service. It sounds relatively simple and straightforward but technologically A huge Challenge and what we've done over the past eight years is actually build out a platform a cloud service with almost 80 points of presence worldwide the deliverer a wide range of networking network security capabilities. Fire warnings new web Gateway caspi antimalware IPS quite a few of those and deliver it to over 1500 customers worldwide 23,000 locations half a million remote users.

So I think what we have done is through the last eight years that it's possible to deliver these kind of capabilities at scale on the cloud and I think it's a it's actually a great news for a lot of our audience in the Tech Community. Love it. So you say you know our audiences I mentioned off camera is very technical, but about I don't know maybe 40% of it comes from a cyber background.

The rest come from devops cloud native, you know that that software development testing. the gamut Some of the developers. I mean when we talk security, they think in terms of deaf secops testing code making sure code is more secure but I don't know if they fully understand the challenges of trying to do, you know, what was traditional network security putting big appliances right at the entrance to the castle and having a moat right?

And you had a choke point with a firewall or what have you? And what you know saying I'm gonna do that from the cloud sounds very easy as you said but it's really very hard because you don't have that choke point necessarily. You don't have that big box sitting in front of the land there may not even be a land.

It's a win. It's work from anywhere. Why don't we first talk about really some of the challenges?

That Cato, you know tackles here in when we you know, we talk about moving it to the cloud. Right, and I think you made a very good point about the choke point, right? So if you think about this big Appliance or appliances they are present in certain locations where traffic must go to in order to be processed inspected cure and then go to the Internet or to the cloud.

And it it had worked in a world where everything was centralized. We had applications in a data center where we would put this firewall to all the traffic we go to the data center. And from there.

It will go either to applications on Prem or to the few applications that were on the Internet or in the cloud. And we move to a world where it's everywhere to everywhere users can be everywhere and applications can be everywhere right these Cloud maybe folks. They are part of these movement moving on premise applications to the cloud delivering applications from the cloud doing it in a global fashion.

You may have multiple applications running they can regions. So all the looking what do you put security here? Where is the job?

There is no choke point and the killing Ovation is these this cloud service with 80 points of presence is in the middle of everything? Okay. So it is basically this house which board we're all traffic go through and then comes out and wherever and whatever fashion session you have use earth when applications application.

I will be to the cloud. It doesn't matter what the edges what the source it is what the destination is. There's always Security layer that sits in the middle of everything and that's a very big change from the traditional model where Appliance were sitting by themselves in some age and all the traffic has to be artificially in awkwardly get to them just to be inspecting we take away this trombone effect if you like which is rocking traffic in an inefficient way just to have it inspected by devices that were built for a centralized World, which doesn't exist anymore.

Absolutely, excellent. And look this is not new obviously, right this we we've You know been exposed to Cloud now for 15 plus years. I think people are understanding, you know, you have identity and access management to Cloud resources.

There is no more centralized. You know land type of thing. But so, you know, it's all in there now.

But to take that as a business model. And and recently Cato reached a kind of Milestone here of a hundred million dollars ARR, is that correct? That's correct.

I mean that's that's you know a million here a million there before, you know, it's a lot of money, you know that that's a significant amount of money. on that business model right of delivering this security via the cloud. What does that mean?

What do you think it means to our audience? Why you know beyond it's a lot of money shy right? No you everyone knows that but what does it mean?

So I think the first thing is that keto has been working hard to prove that we can operate at the scale and the resiliency at the capability level that Enterprise spit. It's not trivial you're used to do something for 20 years in certain way somebody comes in and say we're gonna do it completely differently and we're gonna do it in the most Mission critical part of your business, which is your network that connects everybody and the security that protects everyone. So when you reach 100 million with the number of customers, we have the locations the clouds the all these different users.

I think customers first of all have a confident. This is not a normal idea. It's not a concert.

It's not the startup that is trying to you know, prove something but in fact has been proven so I think that's the first thing is customers of all sizes can Confident to consider Cloud migration of the networking and security infrastructure. And as you said almost everything is gone to the cloud. It's some shady form and networking and security the network security these Appliance elimination replacement is something that is very new or is the last pillar of it infrastructure to really move to the cloud.

I think that's the first thing is there's confidence in the ability to take this idea this vision of convergence in the cloud for these pillars and adapted because so many organizations have in Mission critical environments in retail in many factoring in legal in finance. It works. The second thing is obviously that we are now over 700 people.

We have a massive roadmap to deliver in a very large amount of new capabilities continuously. That's a benefit of the cloud model. If you're familiar with the clients and the audience is, you know, that a plans vendors release and new version every six months every nine months.

There's a new build for the applies. It has these new features. We release new features every two weeks so we can run 26 upgrades of the cloud every year.

So there is this way of new capabilities that customer basically can access can utilize without Grace without patches without all this hard work of just bringing all these physical into structure. So they're gonna get more capabilities. They're gonna get them faster.

They can adopt them faster and what's nice about Convergence is that their TCO their total cost of ownership is not going to change meaning if you need to consume 20 features of security and you want to go to 30 today. It means more Point Solutions more people to maintain then you need expert just for these functions here. Everything comes through the same model same platform.

You're actually gonna be able to keep the same team more or less and adopt so much more capabilities so many more capabilities, which is the value of the cloud. So production scale more features delivered faster that you can consume with a smaller team. I think that's that's where networking and security is going I agree.

I agree with you, you know, we friends what we got it too faster. We're going to be more inclusive. Right Securities, everyone's responsibility.

And we and we we also need to deliver results. You know, we were kidding before coming on. I was outed Vegas last week for the AWS reinvent show and besides a lot of our people getting sick there.

security was so like right in your face security was job one right for everything and and reinvent this developers that security people there's operations people. It's everything but I think never before have we seen security become so front and center. Right, as you know, everyone really focuses in on it.

Look that's got to mean something for Kato networks going forward too. What do you think you shine later? Where does you know this emphasis on security?

It's obviously got to help but how does Kato use that to help our audience? So when we think about clouds or cloud data centers Cloud applications, they are edges to our Cloud Network meaning we are inspecting all the traffic going in and out of these cloud data centers and in and out of the SAS applications that the organization is using Office 365 right box all these guys. So you actually get the same engine the same layers of security basically dealing with the production traffic.

Okay, meaning that basically we can look for threats trying to Target the cloud data centers or if something got the whole data center. They're trying to come out we actually going to intercept it and so here provides this And a leveling of the playing field, right? It's not one solution for on-prem and one other solution for the cloud.

It's also Cloud diagnostic because we are the switch or the Hub. Then we treat Microsoft assure traffic like we would treat AWS practical I would Google traffic. So all of these capabilities are consistently enforced across all clouds and all applications.

So that's another dimension where we do and in fact, if you look at our customer base, there are probably over 500 cloud data centers connected to the hero infrastructure is yet another age, meaning or within an organization. Some of our customers have seven or eight cloud data centers globally and they're all part of the same policy the same governance the same control and also gives the customers and the IT audience the freedom to migrate applications on Prem to the cloud and back it. A matter where the application is that going to be controls applied to it regardless where it is.

So customers can gradually migrate and this is something that unlike. Startups that tend to focus on the future. Okay, we're gonna develop just Cloud security.

We actually with our solution. We are backward and forward compatible. We would protect your applications in on-prem and in the cloud in the same way.

God makes perfect sense you shy where we're almost out of time, but for people who want to get more information about Cato check it out. Maybe be contacted. What do you suggest?

So they could come to our website Kayla. com. We have a contact.

App or you just want to be a call back. I will be very happy to to have this conversation. I think that for the vast majority organizations Kettle can dramatically reduce your costs your complexity and empower the team to focus on what's important, which is securing the business instead of maintaining the infrastructure and I think that's that's a big value for all of our customers.

Absolutely. Hey, I want to thank you for coming out here on Tech strung TV. It's been a while since we had an update and it's good to hear what's happening and continued success in Kato.

Thank you very much and great being here and looking forward to our next time. Okay, we're gonna take a break here on Tech strong TV. We'll be right back.