Turning the world's fastest SASE into the world's fastest electric car race

Finally in Tokyo! Cato Networks, the company behind racing, achieves 10G transfer, the first SASE vendor to do so

Cato Networks participates as an official SASE sponsor of the TAG Heuer-Porsche team in Formula E, a global electric car race.
Then, on March 30th, the long-awaited first-ever race on public roads in Japan was held at Odaiba in Tokyo as the Tokyo E-Prix.

The parking lot and roads outside Tokyo Big Sight, which I always visit for exhibitions, were turned into a racing course, creating a different scene. Inside the exhibition hall, there was a game corner, an exhibition corner for each team, food and drink booths, and it was very lively.

The surprise at this Tokyo event was the machine color, wrapped in shocking pink to coincide with the cherry blossom season. It's one of Porsche's playful touches. In addition, the hats worn by the Cato Networks support team were also pink at the Tokyo event.

Formula-E is an electric car race in which 12 teams from six countries around the world compete against each other.

All cars are based on common specifications for cost reasons, and the difference between them lies in the efficiency of the driver and how they use electricity.

The day before the race, Cato Networks announced "SASE vendor's first 10Gbos high-speed throughput support" at the Porsche Studio Ginza in Tokyo. By achieving 10Gbps, Cato Networks not only participated in the ABB FIA Formula-E World Championship, but also became the first SASE platform to provide such powerful performance that the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula-E team was able to transfer all data for the entire season within 2.5 hours instead of 3.5 days. Looking at the trends of customers who have adopted Cato Networks, the amount of communication to clouds, including AWS, is increasing, and many companies are allocating hundreds of megabits to AWS.

Cato SASE speed record: Overtaking other SASE solutions

As SASE is adopted by large enterprises, higher capacity connectivity becomes essential to meet various business needs such as bandwidth-intensive applications (cloud storage and backup, disaster recovery), hybrid cloud environments connecting two parts of a data center for inter-application processing, and large campus networks.

To address these challenges, Cato delivers 10Gbps throughput over a single encrypted tunnel, with Cato Cloud Interconnect and Cato Sockets for faster speeds without the need for expensive hardware upgrades that are common with appliance-based architectures.

The sequential execution of multiple solutions such as packet encryption/decryption, security inspection, etc., which typically slows down the performance of edge appliances, is handled by the "Cato Single Pass Processing Engine (SPACE) Core" to simultaneously process real-time traffic within Cato PoPs (Points of Presence). Parallel network flow processing is also enabled within Cato Sockets to maximize end-to-end throughput.

In contrast, SASE solutions that implement virtual machines (VMs) in the cloud, or reconfigured web proxies, are limited to less than 2Gbps of single-tunnel throughput as of May 2024. Appliance-based SASE solutions max out at just under 3Gbps. The lower throughput forces enterprises to artificially split traffic within locations across multiple tunnels from edge appliances to SASE PoPs, introducing complexity and risk that is not present in the Cato SASE Cloud.

Data-Driven Racing: Connecting Tokyo with fast cars and a fast network

The 2024 Tokyo E-Prix was the perfect venue to showcase Cato's groundbreaking performance. In the fast-paced world of Formula-E, every second counts. The sport is deeply data-driven, with teams relying on IT networks to analyse data and make split-second decisions on key strategies to secure victory. Multiple computers in the cars generate between 100 and 500 billion data points per event, with more than 400 gigabytes of data being generated and sent to the cloud for analysis.

There will be 16 E-Prix this season, many of which will take place in areas with less developed infrastructure, such as the Tokyo Motor Show. The ABB FIA Formula E World Championship will provide a fantastic network and security stress test. The Cato SASE Cloud provided fast, secure and reliable access to the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula-E team, regardless of location.

Before the race on the day, Formula-E racing driver Simona de Silvestro was given a Q&A session at the Porsche Studio Ginza in Tokyo. When I asked her about it, she told me that a huge amount of machine data, video and audio data from the car are sent to Porsche headquarters in Germany, and that this data is important for analyzing the race and cannot be overlooked.

Tokyo, Osaka and now Sapporo will form the three PoP locations in Japan. In Tokyo, three Cato PoPs serve the region. Two others serve Osaka. A sixth PoP will be established in Sapporo. If a user or location loses access to one of the PoPs, it will immediately fail over to one of the other PoPs in Japan. This will provide the TAG Heuer Porsche Formula-E team and all Cato customers with highly reliable access not only from Tokyo but from around the world, while also providing cyber security measures across the global network.

Then, Etay Maor, former senior director of security strategy at Cato Networks, a security researcher, introduced some examples of the latest AI-based cybersecurity attacks and risks, as well as his research results, making us realize that we have entered an era where security measures must be addressed with machine learning and cloud computing. The security measures of Cato SASE are maintained by security specialists like this.

This time, Nissan Motors was expected to win in their home country, but I applied for the e-ticket advance sale as an individual but lost the lottery, and even when I applied again for the general sale, I was unable to get a ticket. Later, I heard that the tickets were sold out in just three minutes after they went on sale at midnight, so I felt that this motorsport event was more popular than expected. Tokyo Governor Koike and Prime Minister Kishida were also in attendance at the opening ceremony.

We look forward to the event being held in Japan again next year and to new Cato Networks announcements.

Macnica
Networks Company 3rd Sales Division 2nd Sales Department 4th Section SASE EXPERT
Fujio Suzuki

In 1989, he was in charge of optical fiber products in the US. After that, he worked as Macnica webmaster in the information systems department, building and managing websites. In 2005, he started working in cloud service sales, and in 2010, he promoted CSIRT as a Splunk product manager. In 2019, he was in charge of product marketing at Cato Networks. He is certified as a SASE Expert Level 2 and SSE Expert, and his hobby is marine sports.