Regional Sales Director

Cato Networks has unveiled a modular adoption model for its SASE platform, allowing organisations to start with specific capabilities and expand over time. The company offers four standalone modules: AI Security, SD-WAN, SSE and Universal ZTNA, all powered by a converged platform architecture. Each module functions as a complete enterprise solution whilst sharing a unified management console, policy framework and data lake. The platform runs on Cato Neural Edge, a GPU-powered global backbone spanning over 85 points of presence, with a 99.999% uptime service-level agreement. Cato Networks was named a Leader in Gartner's 2025 Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms for the second consecutive year. The platform is now generally available worldwide with user-based and site-bandwidth pricing that allows flexible scaling and phased deployment.

Cato Networks unveils GPU-powered SASE with native AI security controls. Mar 17, 2026 4 mins Cato Neural Edge embeds Nvidia GPUs to enable real-time traffic inspection, and Cato AI Security unifies AI governance and runtime protection for enterprise AI adoption. Cato Networks this week launched two additions to its secure access service edge (SASE) platform that the company says will address security challenges enterprises are facing now: protecting the AI tools end users rely on, while also using AI to defend against sophisticated threats. Cato Neural Edge deploys Nvidia GPUs across the 85+ points of presence (PoPs) of Cato's global private backbone to enable real-time traffic inspection, threat detection, and policy enforcement. Cato is also launching Cato AI Security, which combines AI governance and runtime protection capabilities the company acquired with AIM Security into the Cato SASE Platform. "AI is changing both sides of the equation: the threats we face and the defenses we need. With Cato Neural Edge and Cato AI Security, we are empowering enterprises to strengthen AI-driven defense and govern enterprise AI without sacrificing performance or adding operational complexity," said Matan Getz, vice president of AI security at Cato Networks, in a statement. According to Gartner, by 2028, more than 75% of enterprises will rely on AI-amplified cybersecurity products for the majority of use cases, up from less than 25% in 2025. This reality is reshaping cybersecurity, according to Cato Networks, and driving the need for enterprises to "evolve both their security controls and the infrastructure powering them." Cato Neural Edge embeds a GPU-powered enforcement layer directly within the company's global PoP network, enabling Cato's platform to execute intelligence and enforcement within the PoP itself, the company says. Cato Neural Edge can enable: * High-frequency execution of AI/ML models inline * Real-time semantic and behavioral inspection * Scalable analysis across global traffic flows * Deterministic performance without external processing layers Cato AI Security is designed to govern employee use of AI tools, secure homegrown AI applications, and enforce guardrails for autonomous AI agents, according to the company. It can operate as a standalone solution or with additional Cato SASE Platform capabilities, including SD-WAN, SSE, and universal ZTNA. The capabilities can be managed via a unified control plane and policy engine that shares context across the platform to deliver faster detection and response, Cato says. One early adopter shared their impressions of the Cato AI Security capability: "One of the biggest advantages for us is that AI security isn't another console or separate enforcement layer. It's built directly into the Cato SASE Platform," said Marc Crudgington, vice president of cybersecurity and IT infrastructure at global logistics company Crane Worldwide Logistics, in a statement. "We can govern AI usage, secure homegrown AI applications, and manage agent workflows using the same policy engine and data lake that already protect our network and cloud environments. That unified architecture reduces complexity and ensures consistent enforcement everywhere AI operates." Cato SASE Cloud Platform runs on a private global backbone of more than 85+ points of presence (PoP) connected via multiple SLA-backed network providers. The PoPs software continuously monitors the providers for latency, packet loss, and jitter to determine in real-time the best route for every packet. Cato applies optimization and acceleration to all traffic going through the backbone to enhance application performance and the user experience. To ensure all locations benefit, Cato optimizes traffic from all the edges and toward all destinations, on-premises and in the cloud. Cato AI Security is generally available to customers worldwide. Cato Neural Edge has been deployed across the Cato SASE Platform. Network World smart answers. From our editors straight to your inbox. Get started by entering your email address below. Senior Editor Denise Dubie is a senior editor at Network World with nearly 30 years of experience writing about the tech industry. Her coverage areas include AIOps, cybersecurity, networking careers, network management, observability, SASE, SD-WAN, and how AI transforms enterprise IT. A seasoned journalist and content creator, Denise writes breaking news and in-depth features, and she delivers practical advice for IT professionals while making complex technology accessible to all. Before returning to journalism, she held senior content marketing roles at CA Technologies, Berkshire Grey, and Cisco. Denise is a trusted voice in the world of enterprise IT and networking.

Cato integrates native, behavior-based auto-adaptive threat prevention into its SASE platform. Cato Networks has announced an auto-adaptive threat prevention engine within its SASE platform, enabling enterprises to proactively block advanced threats that use legitimate tools and targets. Cato Dynamic Prevention continuously evaluates activity in full context, correlating signals from across Cato's sensors over months of activity. Once malicious behavior is identified, Cato automatically adapts and enforces restrictions across related actions by threat actors, stopping threats early without adding operational overhead or requiring IT or SOC intervention. "From a CISO perspective, the biggest risk today is that advanced attacks don't arrive as a single event. They develop quietly over time, spread across users, sites, and systems, and exploit the gaps between disconnected tools," said Giles Ashton-Roberts, CISO at Swissport International AG, a global leader in airport ground services and air cargo handling with 360+ sites, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS) instances, and 26,000+ users on the Cato SASE Platform. "At Swissport, we operate in a truly always-on environment. There's no downtime when you're supporting hundreds of airport locations across the globe," said Ashton-Roberts. "In that kind of environment, delayed detection directly impacts our ability to respond. The Cato Dynamic Prevention launch is emblematic of why unifying all security and networking signals into a single platform matters, because only with that level of visibility and context can security teams respond fast enough to stop threats before they disrupt critical operations." Advanced threats continue to evade enterprise defenses. Advanced attacks increasingly blend into normal enterprise activity by abusing legitimate tools and targets. Rather than triggering a single high-confidence alert, threat actors execute a series of low-signal actions over time, each appearing benign in isolation. This approach allows malicious behavior to evade traditional, point-in-time inspection and remain undetected during the early, and most preventable, stages of an attack. Security point solutions are typically not built to identify these patterns. Operating in silos, they lack the context needed to correlate activity across time, hosts, and networks. Even when threats are eventually detected, response is often manual and delayed, giving threat actors time to persist, move laterally, and escalate impact. According to Gartner, "61% of enterprises lack full-time threat hunting experts and rely on reactive analysts repurposing their time, leaving teams underfunded, misaligned, and vulnerable." This critical gap between detection and timely prevention is where advanced threats succeed, and where security point solutions fall short. Cato Dynamic Prevention stops advanced threats with real-time, behavior-based threat prevention. Cato Dynamic Prevention closes the gap by identifying and automatically stopping advanced threats that evade point-in-time inspection. Built natively into the Cato SASE Platform, Cato Dynamic Prevention continuously correlates months of security and networking activity in real time across Cato's full range of inline sensors, such as DLP, IPS, and NGAM, and out-of-band engines to identify behavior-based threats that appear benign in isolation. Once identified, Cato dynamically applies adaptive rules, blocking high-risk activity in real time. As a result, enterprises gain: * Reduced risk exposure: Address threats earlier by identifying and stopping malicious activity before it escalates. * Stronger security posture: Protect proactively against the misuse of legitimate tools and previously unseen behaviors. * Greater IT and SOC efficiency: Reduce false positives and manual investigation, allowing IT and security teams to focus on higher-value work. "Enterprises are already struggling to stop advanced threats that unfold quietly over time, and with the explosion of AI and autonomous agents, the threat landscape is accelerating exponentially. Threat actors abuse trusted tools and valid credentials, knowing most defenses still analyze isolated events and rely on humans to connect the dots for more complex attack chains," says Lior Cohen, VP of product management, security and management at Cato Networks. "Cato Dynamic Prevention changes the game by continuously understanding behavior in context, predicting the threat actor's next move, and enforcing protection automatically that would only impact true positive threats. As a result, this stops potential threats before a breach ever takes shape," Cohen concluded. More about