Cato Networks, a leading figure in Secure Access Service Edge (SASE), has announced its groundbreaking expansion into threat detection and incident response with the launch of Cato XDR. As the world's first SASE-based, extended detection and response (XDR) solution, Cato XDR leverages the functional and operational capacities of the Cato SASE Cloud. The solution is designed to counteract the shortcomings often linked to traditional XDR implementations, namely: lengthy deployment times, reduced data quality, and subpar investigation and response experiences.

Parallel to the launch of Cato XDR, the company also introduces Cato EPP. This SASE-managed endpoint protection platform (EPP/EDR) represents Cato's inaugural expansion beyond its primary SASE remit, established in 2016 and later defined by industry analysts in 2019. By incorporating threat detection, incident response, and endpoint protection, Cato broadens the realm of SASE while preserving its inherent architectural allures.

Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato Networks, highlights the significance of this enhancement to the company’s offering: "Cato SASE continues to be the antidote to security complexity. Today, we extend our one-of-a-kind SASE platform beyond threat prevention and into threat detection and response. Only Cato and our simple, automated, and elegant platform can streamline security this way."

As an early adopter, grocery chain Redners Markets cited significant improvements through utilising the Cato platform. Nick Hidalgo, Vice President of IT and Infrastructure at the Pennsylvanian-based company, reported that the platform had given them “better visibility, saved time on incident response, resolved application issues, and improved network performance ten-fold."

Art Nichols, CTO of Windstream Enterprise, a Cato partner, describes the merging of XDR and EPP into SASE as "a game-changer for the industry". Nichols highlighted how the convergence of these capabilities into one unified, cloud-native platform has the potential to revolutionise how companies defend their networks and data from increasingly complex cyber threats.

The innovation is grounded in the extensive advantages offered by the Cato SASE Cloud platform, the first platform designed to empower businesses to secure and streamline sites, users, and cloud assets globally. Unlike fragmented security solutions and appliances, Cato’s services are instantly deployed, accessible at scale, and fully integrated. This provides IT teams with a single global context for network understanding, threat prevention, and problem resolution.

Cato XDR counteracts the limitations of traditional XDR tools by offering immediate global activation, providing businesses with immediate insights into network threats. With a wide array of native sensors, Cato XDR ensures accurate incident detection. The introduction of Cato EPP, powered by Bitdefender's renowned malware prevention technology, ensures protection against endpoint attacks. This convergence of endpoint threat and user data into Cato's data lake simplifies cross-domain event coordination, resulting in high-quality data that enhances the incident identification and remediation process. These capabilities result in faster threat detection and resolution, with incident reporting further simplified by the inclusion of generative AI, boosting the effectiveness of investigations.