Hey everyone, I've been doing a ton of research on SASE platforms for our upcoming network overhaul. We're a distributed company with about 350 employees across 12 offices. Cato Networks keeps coming up in every shortlist, especially for its all-in-one approach.
Most of the reviews and case studies I find are either from very large enterprises or seem like promotional material. I'm really curious to hear from teams at a similar scale to us.
For those actually running Cato in production with 300+ users:
* What was the real driver for choosing them over, say, a combination of traditional SD-WAN with a separate cloud security stack? Was it truly about simplification, or were there specific technical or cost advantages?
* How has the performance been, especially for latency-sensitive apps (like VoIP or video conferencing) from smaller regional offices? Any unexpected issues after the cutover?
* I'm a bit cautious about the "single vendor" lock-in, even though it's appealing. Has managing everything through their portal lived up to the promise, or do you find you need to work around limitations?
Also, if anyone has rough ballpark figures on the per-user/month cost at that scale (feel free to DM if you're more comfortable), it would be incredibly helpful for our budgeting. We're currently comparing it to building out something with Zscaler and a separate SD-WAN vendor, and the operational overhead is a big part of the equation.