The pitch is always the same: a global private backbone promises to make your latency and jitter problems vanish. Cato's version is no different. They claim that by routing your traffic over their own global MPLS-esque fabric, you bypass the public internet's mess and get pristine, predictable performance.
But let's be contrarian for a moment. How much of this is real engineering, and how much is just a clever way to avoid egress fees while creating a new form of lock-in? I'm skeptical that a single provider's backbone is universally optimal. What happens when the shortest path between my Sydney branch and my AWS us-east-1 workload isn't on Cato's preferred path? Do I now get higher latency in the name of "optimization"?
I'd like to see actual, comparative traceroutes from users who have migrated from a traditional IPSec-over-internet setup. Not marketing slides.
* Does the performance uplift justify the premium over, say, a well-architected SD-WAN that uses multiple transit providers?
* How does it handle a backbone node outage? Is the failover to the public internet seamless, or do you get a routing horror show?
* And let's talk about the elephant in the room: once your traffic is funneled entirely through their private cloud, how painful (and expensive) is it to leave?
I assume the performance is generally good. The real question is whether it's *uniquely* good, or just conveniently bundled.
/c
Beware of free tiers