Cyber security investors, vendors and the press are abuzz with a new concept introduced by Palo Alto Networks (PANW) in their recent earnings announcement and guidance cut: Platformization. PANW rightly wants to address the “point solutions fatigue” experienced by enterprises due to the “point solution for point problem” mentality that has been prevalent in cyber security over the years.

More than just introducing XDR today, Cato announced the first XDR solution to be built on a SASE platform. Tapping the power of the platform dramatically improves XDR’s quality of insight and the ease of incident response, leading to faster incident remediation. “The Cato platform gives us peace of mind,” says Shayne Green, an early adopter of Cato XDR and Head of security operations at CloudFactory.

As cyber threats continue expanding, endpoints have become ground zero in the fight to protect corporate resources. Advanced cyber threats pose a serious risk, so protecting corporate endpoints and data should be a high priority. Endpoint Protection Platforms (EPPs) are the first line of defense against endpoint cyber-attacks. It provides malware protection, zero-day protection, and device and application control. Additionally, EPPs serve a valuable role in meeting regulatory compliance mandates.

Today, we have the privilege of speaking with Frank Rauch, Global Channel Chief of Cato Networks, as he shares his insights on our exciting announcement about Cato introducing the world’s first SASE-based, extended detection and response (XDR) and the first SASE-managed endpoint protection platform (EPP).

Generative AI (à la OpenAI’s GPT and the likes) is a powerful tool for summarizing information, transformations of text, transformation of code, all while doing so using its highly specialized ability to “speak” in a natural human language. While working with GPT APIs on several engineering projects an interesting idea came up in brainstorming, how well would it work when asked to describe information provided in raw JSON into natural language?

At Cato our number one goal has always been to simplify networking and security, we even wrote it on a cake once so it must be true: Figure 1 – A birthday cake Applying this principle to our XDR offering, we aimed at reducing the complexity of analyzing security and network incidents, using a data-driven approach that is based on the vast amounts of data we see across our global network and collect into our data lake.

Many security vendors offer automated detection of cloud applications and services, classifying them into categories and exposing attributes such as security risk, compliance, company status etc. Users can then apply different security measures, including setting firewall, CASB and DLP policies, based on the apps categories and attributes. It makes sense to conclude that the more apps are classified, the merrier. However, such a conclusion must be taken with a grain of salt.