Cato Networks and KDDI are teaming up to provide Cato's SASE services to enterprises in North America, Europe and the Asia Pacific.

Partnering with a tier 1 service provider is a new move for Cato, which historically competed with telcos on the SD-WAN front and dubbed itself the "un-carrier" of managed SD-WAN services. Cato has its own private global Cato Cloud Network of 65 PoPs and typically partners with distributors, master agents, ISPs and resellers to reach enterprise end-users.

In 2018, VP of Marketing Yishay Yovel told Light Reading that the company is "competing more and more with established telcos... could be an Aryaka but also could be British Telecom, sometimes AT&T."

In more recent years, Cato relocated to the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) category, rebranding as a SASE provider that provides SD-WAN as part of its portfolio. "SD-WAN is just a small part of what we do," Dave Greenfield, secure network evangelist for Cato Networks, told Light Reading in a podcast.

Roy Chua, founder and principal of AvidThink, says Cato's partnership with KDDI could mark the beginning of other collaborations with service providers.

"This particular announcement is both surprising and impressive – they have a carrier [partner], KDDI, which is a tier 1," says Chua. "They're offering the service not just in APAC but in North America and Europe, too, so it's not an insignificant announcement. KDDI gains a fresh, new, cool service in SASE…and for Cato, it's great because it's a major CSP reselling their services."

Cato says CSPs can utilize the Cato SASE platform to provide a managed networking and security service to enterprises that are rapidly moving to the cloud, and that need IT and network security support for a larger remote workforce. Cato's network security services include a next-gen firewall, Secure Web Gateway, Advanced Threat Prevention and a Managed Threat Detection and Response (MDR) service. In addition, the company connects customers to cloud providers such as Azure and AWS.

"With a single converged offering, CSPs can offer enterprise customers a secure access solution without the operational overhead of integrating and managing multiple third-party appliances and Virtual Network Functions (VNFs)," explained Cato in a statement.

Cato raised $130 million in its largest funding round to date last November, bringing its total funding to $332 million. Cato claims the company is valued at $1 billion.

— Kelsey Kusterer Ziser, Senior Editor, Light Reading