The security landscape dramatically changed in the past several years due to two major secular trends: cloud and mobile. A decade ago, enterprises could easily protect their employees, data centers, and applications with a traditional network perimeter because everything and everyone was neatly packed in one area. But as personal devices entered the workforce, people began to work from their phones and tablets, in and outside of the office. Coupled with data and applications going to the cloud, the traditional network perimeter started to evolve. Today, enterprises need to think about how to protect corporate networks and office locations beyond headquarters and in the cloud.
In 2015, Shlomo Kramer and his team launched Cato Networks, a security-as-a-service solution with an incredibly bold ambition — replace wide area networking (WAN) and perimeter security equipment with a dedicated cloud service. The current security appliance model is costly, inefficient and hard to manage. However, the convergence of multiple security appliances into a single service as well as the convergence of WAN and security together in the cloud presented a window of opportunity. The combination of both these trends could be disruptive to incumbent vendors.
With Cato, a company can connect each branch office, data center, and HQ, along with its mobile users directly to the Cato Cloud. This provides the connectivity between corporate data centers and branch offices as well as security and other network services. In short, Cato Networks is unifying the network and security stack, and offering a turnkey cloud-based solution. Since launch, Cato has already begun to capture the imagination of customers and security analysts alike as a potential “game changer” in how companies think about managing security.
This impressive vision for the future of security is a result of the impressive Cato Networks team. They are no strangers to security and networking — and no strangers to Greylock. My partner Asheem Chandna worked with Shlomo at Check Point Software, and Greylock was also an investor in Imperva — both co-founded by Shlomo, and both are publically traded companies today. Shlomo has also additionally served on boards with us at Greylock, including Palo Alto Networks and Sumo Logic. Shlomo founded Cato Networks with former Imperva colleague Gur Shatz, and built a team that worked at top networking and security companies including Check Point Software, Imperva, Trusteer and Barracuda Networks. It is a world class team going after an incredibly massive market opportunity and that requires exceptional technology and entrepreneurial spirit. Cato is exactly the kind of team and company we love to back.
Today, we are announcing that Greylock is leading the Series B investment and I will be joining the board. I’m excited to help support and bring the Cato Cloud to all enterprises and simplify security in the cloud.
