Porsche Motorsport is deploying Cato Networks’ secure access service edge (SASE) to meet the unique networking and security needs of its Formula E team, which Senior IT Product Manager Michael Wokusch likened to a “moving circus.”

In the past, the Formula E team relied on typical IT enterprise services at the racetrack, using Porsche-designed and Porsche-approved equipment usually found in data centers and branch offices. But Wokusch said the network environment is getting “more and more complicated,” as the network is moved “more and more into the cloud.”

Initially, Wokusch said the Porsche Motorsport team was in search of a “good SD-WAN'' that enabled multi-uplink applications and robust security features. “Pretty soon we saw SASE is definitely the way,” he added. The team announced Cato Networks as its official SASE partner in November 2022.

The Formula E league provides IT infrastructure during the races including telemetry, radio communication to the driver, as well as the internet connection. According to Wokusch, the internet connection provided is limited to a maximum bandwidth of 50 megabits, which the SASE framework can address with application-specific bandwidth policies.

“That's pretty small, as we want to have several live TV feeds, live intercom services, live communication with several different channels back to our ops room, so that's always tricky,” he told SDxCentral.

Setting up a network for the Formula E team is inherently different from typical deployments, as everything needs to be provided and ready-to-go for an entire race season before it starts, Wokusch said. The Formula E team relocates every week to cities around the world, and has only several hours to set up network equipment before it’s needed on the track.

“We have to get everything up and running where we race in the middle of the cities worldwide. It's really special because they typically can't block it out for a week before,” he added.

Wokusch noted IT is “very limited on time and human resources at the racetrack,” with around 20 engineers allowed on-site due to the Formula E league restrictions. Because of this, he said the Formula E IT team depends heavily on support from its “ops room” managing the Porsche Motorsports network environment back in Germany, which is also managed by a limited team of only six engineers.

The Cato SASE service allows the Formula E team to switch from public to private traffic and segment its network from the rest of the Porsche organization. Wokusch said SASE has given the Formula E IT team insights “completely unknown to [them] before.”

In the last race in Cape Town, its network experienced a packet loss of only 0.23% over the whole event, which he explained “is pretty nice from South Africa to our cloud and ops room in Europe.”

“We transferred from Cape Town about 1450 gigabytes of data back to the cloud and our motorsport home,” Wokusch added. The team was also able to monitor “quite a few” MITRE attacks on its WAN.

The SASE service also enables selective transport layer security (TLS) inspection, allowing the Porsche Motorsport team to identify entire categories such as healthcare or banking as trusted areas not to inspect. Wokusch said this is beneficial for users who “are not the biggest fan” of TLS inspection as leaving these categories uninspected maintains their privacy.

“It's ensuring the privacy still for employees,” he said. “I think that's a good best practice everybody should do.”