Cato Networks today announced that its secure access service edge (SASE) platform has hit a new milestone for performance — achieving 10 Gb/s of throughput.

The milestone is particularly impressive given that less than a year ago, Cato Networks claimed that its SASE platform could scale to 5 Gb/s of throughput, which was already a high watermark. Also noteworthy is that from a customer perspective, the SASE acceleration is coming without the need for a hardware upgrade. The enhanced performance was achieved purely through software enhancements to Cato's cloud-native architecture.

“This inherently shows the power of a true platform approach on a private backbone,” Sangita Patel, Sr. director of global product marketing at Cato Networks, told SDxCentral. “From the customer perspective, the increase in capacity is seamless.”

So how is Cato giving its customer such a big jump in performance?

The answer rests in an understanding of how Cato has architected its platform. Rather than doing all the heavy processing at the edge on customer premises devices, the heavy lifting is done in Cato's cloud points of presence (PoP).

“By distributing more operations across more cores and processors, we continue to eliminate bottlenecks in our architectures that allow higher and higher throughput,” Patel said. “To achieve 10 Gb/s we've completely parallelized flow processing and analysis across multiple cores and processors.”

Hitting the 10 Gb/s throughput figure is not just some kind of empty figure either, it has real enterprise practical utility.

“Achieving 10 Gb/s throughput, beyond 5 Gb/s, is crucial for effectively supporting the data centers of large enterprises,” she said.

Patel added that the 10 Gb/s capability ensures seamless data flow and efficient network operations, especially when transitioning from legacy firewall appliances to firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS). With this high throughput, she said enterprises can optimize their network security infrastructure, enhance performance and streamline operations without compromising on speed or reliability.

Cato points to a current customer need for the new higher throughput.

“We have a customer now that monitors manufacturing activity in real time; they transport this locally collected data across countries for analysis,” she said. “The need for high bandwidth isn’t what’s questioned, it’s how it’s accomplished, and our 10 Gb/s capacity facilitates this use case seamlessly.”

The new 10 Gb/s milestone is officially being announced with Cato's partner TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team at the Tokyo E-Prix. Which is another venue that can benefit from the speed boost.

“At 10 Gb/s, Cato became the first SASE platform to compete not only in the ABB FIA Formula E World Championship, but also to deliver SASE performance so powerful that the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula E Team could transfer all the data of an entire Formula E season in under 2.5 hours instead of 3.5 days,” Patel said.