Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

To compete in today’s retail landscape, IT must support new growth strategies while delivering seamless, secure customer experiences. This means enabling rapid store rollouts, digitizing in-store experiences, and connecting cloud-based systems across every location. Customers expect faster, more connected, and more secure interactions at every touchpoint.

What if operating in China didn’t require a separate architecture? For global enterprises, China is too important and too complex to ignore. Whether you’re already operating there or considering expansion, China introduces unique connectivity, security, and compliance challenges that most global architectures aren’t equipped to handle. Infrastructure gaps, regulatory demands, and inconsistent user experience combine to make China uniquely challenging for IT and security leaders.

Over the past nine years in the SASE business, I’ve had the privilege of speaking with hundreds of IT leaders—CIOs, CISOs, and IT executives. Through these conversations, I’ve found that five main concerns consistently keep them up at night. This blog aims to share those insights and highlight how I’ve seen Cato Networks’ SASE platform help address these challenges, allowing IT leaders to sleep a little easier.

Having spent over two decades navigating the evolving landscape of service provider partnerships, I’ve witnessed firsthand how challenging it can be for providers to maintain profitability and differentiation. Increasingly, relying on legacy vendors feels akin to selling customers a shiny new car equipped with an outdated engine—appealing at first glance but disappointing once in use.

Let’s be honest: Chasing after the so-called ‘best-of-breed’ cybersecurity solutions might seem smart, but it often sets you up for operational headaches. It’s tempting—especially given the persuasive pitches from top-tier vendors—to select the best individual products for each security function.

Ever seen that classic Spider-Man meme where three Spideys are pointing at each other, accusing the others of being impostors? It’s the perfect representation of identity confusion—after all, depending on whom you ask, the “real” Spider-Man could be Tobey Maguire, Andrew Garfield, or Tom Holland. It all comes down to context and baseline—what you grew up with, what you expect, and what “normal” looks like to you.

Most organizations assume a clear boundary between external users, who submit support tickets or service requests, and internal users, who handle them using privileged access. However, when an internal user triggers an AI action from a model context protocol (MCP) tool, such as summarizing a ticket, that boundary can break.

In enterprise IT, there’s a familiar story: moving applications to the cloud is easy—but securely connecting cloud workloads isn’t. Cloud migration is no longer a question of if, but how fast enterprises can make the shift. As of 2025, an estimated 67% of enterprise infrastructure runs in the cloud, highlighting the widespread adoption of cloud hosting and infrastructure services worldwide.

When large language models (LLMs) became popular following OpenAI’s public release of ChatGPT in November 2022, threat actors understood the potential of such systems and how they can be used in their malicious operations. However, the main challenge that threat actors encountered a couple of years ago is that the LLMs were censored and didn’t allow the creation of malicious content. Enter WormGPT.

Today, we’ve announced during AWS re:Inforce 2025 that Cato Networks has received the “Deployed on AWS” badge, which identifies Amazon Web Services (AWS) partners whose products are powered by AWS infrastructure. As a Leader in the 2024 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Single-Vendor SASE, Cato sets the standard for converging networking and security in a single, cloud-native platform.