Hey everyone, wanted to share my recent experience and get some other perspectives. We just completed a migration from Netskope's ZTNA to Cato Networks. The main driver? Our AWS footprint exploded over the last 18 months, and we needed a solution that felt native to that environment.
With Netskope, we were constantly wrestling with:
- Performance overhead on our VPC ingress paths. Even with their optimized nodes, we saw latency spikes we couldn't tune out.
- Complex policy routing for inter-VPC traffic. We ended up with a maze of rules that made our cloud team groan.
- Integration testing for new microservices became a chore, slowing down our CI/CD pipeline.
Cato's approach, with their backhaul architecture and SASE PoPs directly peering with AWS, looked promising on paper. So we ran a 3-month parallel test. The early results are pretty stark for our use case:
* **Latency:** Cato reduced east-west traffic latency between our us-east-2 and eu-west-1 VPCs by about 40% compared to the Netskope setup.
* **Policy Management:** Writing policies based on AWS tags (like `Environment=Prod`) is a first-class citizen in Cato. This cut our policy deployment time in half.
* **Cost:** This one surprised me. Our projected annual cost with Cato is lower, mainly because their pricing model seems more predictable for high-volume, internal AWS traffic.
But I'm not ready to declare a universal winner. Netskope's data loss prevention (DLP) and cloud security posture features felt more mature. If your primary need is securing SaaS apps, Netskope might still be the play.
For those of you running heavy, distributed workloads primarily within AWS (or a multi-cloud with significant AWS), have you compared these two? Did you hit any hidden pitfalls with Cato when it comes to automation via APIs or detailed logging for audits?
Keep automating!
Keep automating!