Cato Networks today added digital experience management (DEM) capabilities to its secure access service edge (SASE) platform to make it simpler to continuously monitor how applications might be adversely impacted by underlying networking issues.
Brian Anderson, global field CTO for Cato Networks, said the Cato Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM) makes it possible for organizations to unify the management of applications, networking and security in a way that ensures better user experiences.
Ensuring the quality of those experiences has become more challenging in an era where remote users now routinely access both software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications over the internet and internal corporate applications over a wide area network (WAN). Cato DEM makes use of a combination of real user and synthetic data and multiple types of artificial intelligence (AI) engines to surface actionable application insights using data the company has already captured in its data lake, said Anderson. IT teams don’t have to set up and maintain their own data lake, he added.
IT teams can now use Cato DEM to quickly pinpoint problems down to individual network hops to provide end-to-end visibility across all user experiences, Anderson noted.
DEM is hardly a new concept, but rather than trying to acquire and maintain a separate management framework, Cato Networks has joined multiple providers of SASE platforms in adding these capabilities. The overall goal is to reduce the total cost of IT by providing DEM capabilities that integrate with the same platforms organizations are relying on to provide secure connectivity, he said,
In fact, DEM is the third such expansion of the Cato SASE platform after the company added extended detection and response (XDR) and endpoint protection (EPP/EDR) capabilities earlier this year.
It’s not clear to what degree larger enterprises are moving toward centralizing the management of applications, networking and security, but in many smaller organizations there is no other option. Hiring specialists to separately manage these functions is simply cost prohibitive. SASE platforms are evolving into a hub through which multiple IT services can be more easily managed.
Of course, each organization will need to determine to what degree they might be inclined to invest specifically in DEM, but it’s apparent that organizations are holding IT teams more accountable for the productivity of the end users they serve, regardless of where an employee is located or happens to be on any given day. It’s not possible to ensure the quality of any application experience without being able to exert some control over the networking services being used to deliver it.
Less clear is to what degree larger enterprises might one day reorganize their IT teams to rely less on specialists. In theory, a flatter IT organization should be able to more adroitly respond to any issue that might arise, especially if AI technologies continue to democratize the management of IT.
In the meantime, IT service management (ITSM) teams would do well to remember that their primary mission is to prevent and remediate issues long before anyone in the organization ever notices there was a disruption in the first place.
