Cato Networks, the cloud-native carrier, announced that its customer, Standard Insurance has won an ICMG Architecture Excellence Awards for its Cato-enabled, digital transformation initiative.

The ICMG Architecture Excellence Awards is a vendor-independent, global competition benchmarking enterprise and IT architecture capabilities. Nominations are submitted by IT teams worldwide and evaluated by a select group of judges. Winning nominations include companies such as Credit Suisse, L'Oreal, and Unisys.

Digital Transformation Enabled By WAN Transformation

Back in 2016, Standard Insurance's CEO initiated a multiyear digital transformation initiative emphasising the importance of online insurance selling. As part of that effort, Standard Insurance needed to upgrade its backend infrastructure, changing its core insurance software and migrating from a private data center to AWS.

Standard Insurance needed an enterprise network optimised for hybrid cloud and with strong protection form internet-borne threats. After two ransomware incidents, the CEO demanded a dramatically improved security posture.

Cato connected the company's 60 branches, the headquarters in Makati, Philippines,  and the company's AWS instance into Cato Cloud. Branch firewall appliances were replaced with Cato Security Services, a tightly integrated suite of cloud-native services built into Cato Cloud that include a next-generation firewall (NGFW), secure web gateway (SWG), URL filtering, and malware prevention.

With Cato, Standard Insurance found it could deploy locations faster, reduce security and management overhead, and slash IT costs. “The cost of the total solution Cato is providing us – including the centralised management, cloud-based monitoring, and reports – matches the cost of the firewall appliances alone. But with appliances, we would still need to add the cost of appliance management, the advanced protection,  and other firewall components,” says Standard Insurance head of infrastructure and cybersecurity Alf Dela Cruz.