Cato Networks launches cloud API to automate and monitor SASE deployments

Cato Networks is now offering its enterprise customers a cloud API to provision and manage their Cato SASE deployments from third-party platforms.

The Cato Cloud AP automatically provisions new sites and policies while also monitoring Cato's network analytics and security events from security information and event managements (SIEMs) software and third-party applications.

The API taps into GraphQL and interfaces to Cato's cloud. Cato said its new API replaces hundreds of third-party API calls with a single Cato Cloud request.

GraphQL enables organizations to tailor their requests to retrieve just the specific data that they want. Older APIs would "over fetch," returning more data than necessary for a single query, consuming more processing cycles and requiring customer-side data post-processing, according to Cato.

"It's typical for network solution providers to provide APIs into their systems for integration with external systems, and to facilitate automation," said Roy Chua, principal and founder of AvidThink. "By opening up an API into the system, Cato Networks is telegraphing a stage of maturity for their solution and responding to their partners' needs for a more integrated workflow, and to build value-add solutions on their platform. 

"They've picked a forward-looking API framework in the form of GraphQL, compared to RESTful interfaces for many existing products. To the extent that their partners can work with GraphQL, it provides improved flexibility and better granularity, without having to lock down or predetermine a family of RESTful APIs. Beyond automation, it will be interesting to see what security use cases their partners utilize Cato's network and security event data for."

CDW, which is a managed service provider, is already using the Cato Cloud API. CDW integrated Cato Cloud into ServiceNow and other management solutions in order to gain increased visibility into the circuits of a managed service client.

The Cato Cloud API offers programmatic monitoring and configurability to increase the visibility and control provided by Cato’s management application. With Cato Cloud API, Cato exposes to third-party platforms all of the same granular networking and security events’ data correlated with a common context for easier analysis.

All of which comes in handy as global IT environments become more complex, which necessitates the need for better automation and monitoring.

Starting on Tuesday, MSPs and enterprises can use the API to automatically provision and manage Cato deployments through their existing SIEMs and management platforms, such as Kibana, ServiceNow, ScienceLogic, and Splunk.

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Five years ago, Cato Networks took a cloud-centric approach to SD-WAN and security. While Gartner coined the SASE (secure access service edge) term last year, Cato maintains that its been providing SASE-based services since it was founded.