Get a grip on your network and security: the complete SASE guide for international organisations

Why networking and security can no longer stand apart

Ten years ago, everything sat in one place. The data centre, the firewall, the employees. You drew a fence around the network, and whoever was inside the fence was safe. That world no longer exists.

Today an international organisation has sites in five countries, a hundred employees working from home, Microsoft 365 in the cloud, an ERP system at a SaaS provider, and a logistics platform exchanging data with three external parties via API. The attack surface is enormous and it grows every month.

Traditional network architectures respond by adding more tools: an extra firewall here, a VPN concentrator there, a CASB for cloud applications. The result is a fragmented landscape of twelve management consoles, ten carriers, eight security vendors and one overworked IT team chasing fires across all of them. It is not scalable and it is certainly not secure.

The answer is convergence: bringing networking and security together into one cloud-native platform. That is exactly what SASE does, and that is why organisations worldwide are taking leave of their legacy infrastructure.

What is SASE? Architecture, components and the power of convergence

SASE stands for Secure Access Service Edge. Gartner introduced the term in 2019 to describe an architecture that combines networking and security functions into a cloud-native service delivered from distributed cloud locations close to the user, at the edge, no longer centralised in the data centre.

A mature SASE platform comprises five core components that together form an integrated whole. SD-WAN handles intelligent connectivity between sites and replaces static MPLS links with dynamic routing across any available connection. FWaaS delivers next-generation firewall protection from the cloud, without hardware at every location. SWG protects users when they access the internet by filtering malicious traffic based on real-time threat intelligence. CASB monitors access to cloud applications and enforces policy on data flowing through SaaS environments. ZTNA replaces VPN with identity-driven access on a least-privilege basis: no one gets more access than strictly necessary.

What sets SASE apart from a random bundle of separate products is the single-pass principle: all security engines inspect traffic simultaneously, without latency, from a single policy engine. One console for management, one audit trail for compliance, one vendor for the full stack. For IT teams tired of complexity, that is a fundamentally different starting point.

For more depth on the architecture and the five components, see our article on what SASE is and how the architecture works. The specific difference with SSE is explained in our SASE versus SSE comparison.

Cato Networks as a platform and why it is different

There are dozens of SASE vendors. But there is one fundamental distinction you need to understand before you make a shortlist: the difference between a platform and a portfolio.

A portfolio is a collection of products that a vendor has built or acquired over the years and brought together under one brand name. They work, but not seamlessly. There are integration points to be managed, separate update cycles and dependencies that create operational complexity.

Cato Networks is different. The platform was built from the ground up as a single cloud-native architecture, powered by a GPU-based global private backbone with more than 85 Points of Presence worldwide. All security engines run in the same single-pass engine. All policies are managed from one console. All telemetry flows into one data platform for AI-driven detection.

In July 2025 Gartner recognised Cato Networks as a Leader in the Magic Quadrant for SASE Platforms for the second year in a row. In March 2026 Cato launched a modular adoption model that lets organisations start with the module that is most urgent, AI Security, SD-WAN, SSE or Universal ZTNA, and extend in phases without re-architecting and without additional licence costs for the transition.

Read more about the platform, the four modules and the technical differentiation in our article on the Cato Networks platform.

From MPLS to cloud-native: the migration route that works

Most international organisations are still locked into MPLS contracts. That is understandable: MPLS delivers predictable performance and has been the backbone of many networks for years. But the costs are high, scalability is limited, and cloud optimisation is virtually zero.

Migrating from MPLS to SD-WAN and SASE is not a big bang. Momentum EMEA uses a phased approach in which the existing infrastructure continues to run in parallel while sites are moved over to Cato one by one. Zero-touch deployment via the Cato Socket means that a site in Germany, Singapore or Sao Paulo can go live without technical staff on the ground. The 4G/5G backup fallback is built in as standard.

Carrier-neutral working is a critical Momentum EMEA advantage here. We are not tied to a single ISP, which means we select the best connectivity option per site and combine it all in one contract and one SLA with the Cato SASE overlay. Read more about the migration approach in our guide on replacing MPLS with SD-WAN and SASE.

NIS2, shadow AI and Zero Trust: the urgent themes of 2026

Three developments dominate the agenda of every CIO and CISO this year. They cannot be viewed in isolation, and all three call for the same answer: a converged platform that delivers visibility, control and demonstrability.

NIS2 and the Cyber Resilience Act. The Dutch transposition of NIS2, the Cyberbeveiligingswet, is approaching enforcement in Q2 2026. For organisations in logistics, manufacturing, business services and other designated sectors this means a duty of care, a reporting obligation and a registration obligation. Directors become personally liable. SASE supports NIS2 compliance directly: ZTNA delivers demonstrable access control, DLP prevents data loss, unified logging produces audit trails and 24/7 monitoring meets the detection and response requirements. Read how this works in our article on NIS2 compliance with one platform.

Shadow AI. More than ninety percent of employees in business environments now use AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, Gemini) even when IT has not approved them. Company data disappears into public models. GDPR violations are lurking. Banning does not work. What works is gaining visibility into which AI tools are being used, enforcing policy through traffic inspection and offering employees safe alternatives. Cato AI Security is purpose-built for this and detects and manages shadow AI in real time from the same platform. Read more about detecting and controlling shadow AI.

Zero Trust. Zero Trust is not a product but a principle: never trust implicitly, always verify, grant least-privilege access to every user on every device from every location. Cato realises Zero Trust technically through ZTNA, microsegmentation, device posture checks and continuous monitoring. It replaces VPN architectures built on the outdated assumption that anyone on the network is also trusted.

Momentum EMEA as implementation partner: underlay and overlay, one source

Many SASE partners deliver the technology. Momentum EMEA delivers more than that.

As EMEA's leading specialised Cato implementation partner we combine the underlay, carrier-neutral internet connectivity for all your sites worldwide, with the overlay of the Cato SASE platform, from one contract, one SLA and one point of contact. That is a fundamentally different proposition than a reseller who only sells a licence and passes the implementation to a third party.

Our implementation method follows four phases: observe (map the current architecture and security posture), design (architecture design and module selection), deliver (phased roll-out with zero-touch deployment) and care (proactive monitoring, quarterly reviews and continuous optimisation). After go-live our 24/7 NOC team monitors your network proactively, not reactively on tickets, with engineers who flag anomalies before they become incidents.

Service tiers run from Silver (monitoring) through Gold (business-hours support) to Platinum (24/7 proactive management). Want to know what this means for your organisation in euros and months? Calculate the ROI through our article on SASE cost and ROI or read how managed SASE works in practice.