Too often, businesses fight against network disruptions, a good portion of these having stemmed from network and connectivity problems. According to an Uptime Institute Intelligence study, nearly a third of all IT outages and over half of major outages caused by external IT vendors are network related.
Even for companies utilizing advanced solutions like Cato's secure private network, disruptions can still occur within the final connection, known as the last mile or the customer's internal network.
Further complicating matters, diagnosing these network incidents often proves to be a time-consuming task for network operations centers, or NOCs. NOC teams are forced to wade through a constant stream of network alerts where they search for patterns and correlations to pinpoint the root cause. Additionally, outages frequently start subtly and manifest as unreported degradations in line quality. These issues tend to go unnoticed until after business hours. As one can imagine, the result is extending their negative impact on an organization's productivity.
With Cato’s recently announced Network Stories for Cato XDR, advanced AI algorithms instantly identify outages in customer networks and conduct root cause analysis.
Here’s how it works.
Network Stories for Cato XDR leverages AI-powered algorithms trained for threat detection. These algorithms analyze network data and incidents to pinpoint the root cause of various network issues, including blackouts, downed links, BGP session disruptions and SLA violations. By prioritizing incidents based on criticality, Cato AI allows NOCs to efficiently allocate resources to the most pressing matters.
Following investigation by NOC teams, Cato provides a comprehensive suite of incident response tools. Network Stories are automatically summarized into clear and concise explanations using generative AI. Additionally, Cato Playbooks offer step-by-step guidance for NOC teams to comprehend the incident and implement appropriate remediation procedures.
Cato's internal support team exemplifies the effectiveness of Network Stories. Since its adoption, identifying last-mile packet loss has become nearly instantaneous. The need for customers to wait days to report outages has been eliminated. Notably, the average time spent on root cause analysis has decreased by 30%, falling below 35 minutes.
"With our converged security and networking platform, we leverage advances in one domain, in this case security, to help another domain – networking," said Shlomo Kramer, CEO and co-founder of Cato. "Our security-trained AI has now been expanded to help NOC teams become smarter, faster and more proactive than ever. This is the value of a true SASE platform."
Businesses relying on Cato are enthusiastic about the new feature. One company, for example, is specialty chemicals company Element Solutions, which leverages Cato SASE Cloud to ensure secure connectivity for its 118 locations, cloud instances and nearly 4,000 remote users. Cato's solution encompasses next-generation firewall, threat prevention features and cloud access security broker capabilities.
However, ESI’s three-person network team is responsible for all site designs, deployments, switches and upgrades. This is a lot for a three-person team.
“We handle all the network operations, engineering, and planning for locations and Azure,” said Brandon Benchley, Senior Network Engineer at ESI. “It's a lot. Cato Network Stories should solve a key pain point for us.”
In summary, the introduction of Network Stories for Cato SDR means that NOC and SOC teams now have a common platform for improved collaboration, and channel partners can quickly bring NOC-as-a-service offerings to market.
Edited by
Alex Passett
