Cato Networks Adds Risk-Based Access Controls to SASE Platform
Cato Networks today revealed it has added risk-based access controls to its managed secure access service edge (SASE) platform.
Eyal Webber-Zvik, vice president of product marketing at Cato Networks, said this capability makes it possible to automatically apply security policies in real-time to any device that connects to the network and can limit access or the amount of bandwidth that might be allocated.
This capability has been embedded within a Cato single pass cloud engine (SPACE) to provide more contextual awareness, he added. Security teams can grant levels of access without having to completely disrupt an end user’s experience, noted Webber-Zvik. The goal is to strike a balance between the need for security and the productivity of the end user, he added.
Cato SPACE achieves that goal by continuously assessing the posture of any device attached to the network. Policies can be automatically applied based on identity, network, data use or whenever a device falls out of compliance, said Webber-Zvik.
With more employees working from home in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic, enforcing security policies has become more challenging. Cato Networks is making a case for a managed SASE platform that provides secure access to the software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) it manages for a wide range of organizations. Rather than requiring organizations to backhaul network traffic through a local data center, it becomes possible to give remote users direct access to a wide range of cloud services and on-premises IT environments. Each organization can either opt to rely on Cato Networks to manage the entire service or continue to manage end-user access to that network themselves.
It’s not clear at what rate organizations are shifting toward SASE-based approaches for managing remote access. However, even as employees begin to return to the office more regularly, the number of employees that work from home has substantially increased. Many of those end users will at some point attempt to connect a new device to a corporate network. Keeping track of which users are accessing IT resources in what has become a much more dynamic environment presents a major challenge as more organizations attempt to enforce zero-trust security policies. As a result, the number of organizations that are opting to rely on network services that are managed and secured by a third party is steadily increasing.
Bring-your-own-device (BYOD), of course, represented a significant security challenge even before the pandemic. Today, BYOD within organizations is often the rule rather than the exception. Organizations need a level of flexibility that is difficult to attain and maintain by an internal IT team on their own, noted Webber-Zvik.
One way or another, the way applications are accessed has forever changed in the era of the cloud. The lingering issue is how those applications will be safely accessed at a time when both the volume and sophistication of cyberattacks only continue to increase.
