The Carlsberg Group, founded in 1847, ranks among the largest brewers in the world with a revenue of $10.6 billion, featuring an expansive lineup of over 140 brands. From a technological point of view, its extensive network links 200-plus sites across Western and Central Europe and Asia. The issue is that Carlsberg’s legacy network's mix of solutions posed management and performance challenges.

Launching new locations was sluggish, VPN connectivity to China proved problematic, and the existing Internet-based SD-WAN didn't effectively serve Carlsberg's VoIP and Microsoft (News - Alert) Office 365 needs.

Security concerns also arose due to the assortment of appliances, leading to fragmented visibility and heightened risks. Carlsberg's aim for consistent zero-trust implementation clashed with the legacy network's limitations. Strategically, the network's diverse origins hindered uniform global service delivery and day-to-day management suffered due to diverse management interfaces and coordination challenges.

In response, Carlsberg sought a modern solution to surmount these challenges and streamline operations. And it found just that with Cato Networks, provider of a single-vendor SASE platform.

Cato Networks offers organizations a unified and simplified approach to wide-area networking, incorporating features like SD-WAN, firewall, secure web gateway and more, delivered through its global private backbone. This architecture enhances agility, reduces complexity and improves security by routing traffic through Cato's optimized points of presence around the world, ensuring secure and optimized connectivity for users, regardless of their location.

Spanning 200-plus locations and 25,000 remote users worldwide, Carlsberg will rely on Cato's cloud-native security capabilities, including SWG, CASB, DLP, ZTNA, FWaaS, IPS and NGAM. This means that Cato's security capabilities allow Carlsberg to have one platform and one security policy worldwide protecting all edges – sites with SD-WAN devices, the cloud with native cloud connectivity and mobile users running the Cato Client.

"The same challenges faced by Carlsberg — optimal security posture, improved global performance, and enhanced business agility everywhere — confront enterprises worldwide every day," said Shlomo Kramer, co-founder and CEO of Cato. "Cato was explicitly built to help companies of all sizes meet those needs.”

The global private backbone of Cato that forms the foundation of Cato SASE Cloud also aligned with Carlsberg's global performance criteria. Carlsberg anticipates the removal of its remaining MPLS, leaning on Cato for applications including VoIP, ERP and others.

"We were looking to move from several regional service providers with fragmented technical solutions to one integrated network and security stack with an end-to-end managed service," said Laurent Gaertner, Global Director of Networks at Carlsberg. "The Cato SASE Cloud and service offering perfectly matched our requirements."