Global Alliance Director

Cato Networks has appointed Chad Gardner as chief revenue officer. Gardner will lead the company's global revenue organisation and scale its go-to-market execution. Gardner joins from Blackfoot Communications, where he served as CRO. He brings over two decades of experience building sales organisations across enterprise infrastructure and cybersecurity. Previously, he held leadership roles at SambaNova Systems, Palo Alto Networks, and Netskope, including vice president of global SASE sales at Palo Alto Networks. Cato Networks provides converged network and security cloud services. The company combines networking, security, and access to provide visibility across enterprises whilst securing AI adoption.

How Brake Masters found success with Cato Networks. Reliable connectivity is essential for any business operating across multiple locations. For Brake Masters, an automotive repair company with locations across the western United States, the company's existing network was beginning to create problems with reliability, bandwidth, and day to day operations. Steve Waibel, Director of IT at Brake Masters, wanted a better solution that could support the company's growing needs while also making the network easier for his team to manage. AeroCom worked with Brake Masters and introduced Steve and his team to Cato Networks. After evaluating several SD WAN providers, Brake Masters ultimately selected Cato as the solution for its network. The move gave the company a more flexible and reliable way to connect its locations while improving performance for both employees and customers. About me. Mike Smith has been helping companies select the best telecom, WAN, security, and cloud services since 1999. He founded AeroCom in 2003, and has been the recipient of numerous business telecommunications industry awards, including being recognized as one of the top 40 business people in tech-heavy Orange County, CA. Follow Mike on YouTube, LinkedIn, Reddit and SpiceWorks. Moving away from MPLS. Before implementing Cato Networks, Brake Masters relied on MPLS connections between its retail locations and its data center. While MPLS had served the company for years, Steve explained that the network was becoming increasingly difficult to rely on. Locations regularly experienced connectivity problems, bandwidth was limited, and opening new stores could require long waits for new network connections to be installed. The limited bandwidth was also affecting customers. Guest WiFi at some Brake Masters locations was extremely slow, which made it difficult for customers waiting for their vehicles to browse the internet or stream content. As the company continued to grow, Brake Masters needed a network that could provide better performance without adding more complexity for its IT team. After moving to Cato Networks, Brake Masters saw an immediate improvement. According to Steve, the company increased its available bandwidth by approximately 30 times compared with its previous network. The improvement made guest WiFi significantly faster, and Steve noted that customer complaints about WiFi essentially disappeared after the new network was deployed. Better reliability and easier management. Reliability was another major improvement for Brake Masters. With Cato, locations could use multiple internet connections, providing redundancy if one connection experienced an outage or performance issue. Network traffic could automatically move to another available connection, helping locations remain online without employees having to manually intervene. For a business like Brake Masters, that reliability is important. Locations depend on their network for everyday operations, including point of sale systems, employee communications, business applications, and customer WiFi. Keeping those services available helps stores operate without unnecessary interruptions. Cato also gave Steve and his IT team greater visibility into the entire network. Through a centralized management platform, the team could monitor locations, manage firewall policies, review network activity, and quickly identify potential connectivity issues. Instead of waiting for a store to call and report a problem, the IT team could often see an issue and begin addressing it before employees at the location even noticed. The transition also made it easier for Brake Masters to bring new locations online. Installing traditional MPLS circuits could take a significant amount of time, which sometimes created challenges when opening a new store. With Cato Networks, the process became much simpler and gave Brake Masters more flexibility as the company expanded. A successful experience with Cato Networks. Steve described the difference between the previous network and Cato Networks as night and day. After dealing with slow speeds, outages, and the limitations of MPLS, Brake Masters gained a network with greater bandwidth, stronger reliability, easier management, and a better experience for customers. For AeroCom, Brake Masters is a great example of what can happen when a business is matched with the right technology provider. AeroCom was proud to introduce Brake Masters to Cato Networks and help Steve and his team find a solution that addressed the challenges they were experiencing. Its role at AeroCom is to help businesses understand the technology options available to them and determine which providers make the most sense for their specific needs. Every company has different requirements, and choosing between networking, security, connectivity, and cloud providers can quickly become complicated. Having a partner that understands the available solutions can make that process much easier. Brake Masters has had a strong experience with Cato Networks, and AeroCom, Inc. is glad to see the solution continuing to support the company and its locations. Is your business considering SD WAN or SASE? If your organization is dealing with unreliable connectivity, limited bandwidth, an aging MPLS network, or challenges managing multiple locations, AeroCom can help you evaluate your options. AeroCom, Inc. work with businesses to compare leading SD WAN, SASE, networking, security, and connectivity providers and identify solutions that fit their environment, requirements, and budget. If you would like to learn more about Cato Networks or compare Cato with other providers, contact AeroCom to discuss your options. You can also watch Steve Waibel from Brake Masters share his experience with Cato Networks in the video above.

Cato Networks achieves AWS Security Competency in AI Security. Technology · OCT 6, 2026 PR Newswire Designation validates Cato's expertise in helping organizations secure agentic AI and defend against AI-driven threats TEL AVIV-YAFO, Israel, Oct. 6, 2026... Designation validates Cato's expertise in helping organizations secure agentic AI and defend against AI-driven threats TEL AVIV-YAFO, Israel, Oct. 6, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Cato Networks, the converged network and security cloud for the AI era, today announced that it has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) Security Competency in AI Security status in the Agentic AI category. Cato is one of fewer than 25 AWS partners to earn the AI Security Competency, a designation that recognizes Cato's capabilities in securing the AI interactions that AWS customers increasingly rely upon. The AWS Security Competency Program helps customers identify AWS Partners with deep technical expertise and proven customer success in securing AWS environments. Partners with the AI Security Competency offer solutions and services that support the safe deployment, of production grade AI systems capable of autonomous reasoning, planning, collaboration, tool use and execution. Cato AI Security both runs on AWS and helps secure AI built on AWS. As enterprises build on Amazon Bedrock and Amazon SageMaker, Cato AI Security inspects and protects the traffic to and from those services in real time, without a separate security stack layered on top of each one. Through API integration, it ingests and governs activity from Bedrock-based workloads, extending visibility and policy-driven governance without requiring additional software in the Bedrock environment. As organizations expand their AI initiatives, Cato extends the same protections across their AI use without requiring separate tools for each service. Customers can also identify unapproved AI use, help prevent sensitive information from being shared with AI tools, and maintain a clear record of AI activity and security actions. "Enterprises building AI on AWS need to protect sensitive data and govern how users, applications, and agents interact to enable the innovation and productivity of AI while managing the risks" said Ofir Agasi, chief product officer at Cato Networks. "Achieving this competency recognizes Cato's expertise in helping customers meet those needs. We bring AI security into the same platform that connects and secures the enterprise, giving customers a unified foundation to adopt AI confidently at scale." To learn more about how Cato helps organizations stay ahead of AI-powered attacks, visit https://www.catonetworks.com/solutions/frontier-ai/ About Cato Networks Cato Networks delivers the converged network and security cloud for the AI era. Cato unifies networking, security, and access to provide complete visibility across the enterprise, shared context across users, applications, data, and AI interactions, and unified control to act on that intelligence. Cato combines AI-powered security with autonomous protection to defend against evolving threats, secure AI adoption, and help organizations stay ahead of an increasingly AI-driven threat landscape. Trusted by thousands of organizations worldwide, Cato simplifies operations, strengthens resilience, and accelerates secure innovation. Want to learn why thousands of organizations secure their future with Cato? Visit us at www.catonetworks.com. Media Contact SOURCE Cato Networks Published by News Desk · WeeklyReviewer The WeeklyReviewer news desk monitors breaking developments around the clock - sourcing, verifying, and publishing real-time industry news across business, technology, politics, science, sports, and world affairs. Every story that comes through the Live Wire is reviewed for accuracy before publication, keeping our readers ahead of the curve without the noise.