Cloud networking company Cato Networks Ltd. today unveiled two major innovations for the Cato SASE Platform that are designed to secure enterprise artificial intelligence adoption at scale: Cato Neutral Edge and Cato AI Security.

Cato Neural Edge sees the deployment of Nvidia Corp. graphics processing units across Cato’s global private backbone to accelerate AI-driven analysis for real-time traffic inspection, threat detection and policy enforcement, while Cato AI Security uses technology from Cato’s acquisition of Aim Security Ltd. to deliver advanced AI governance and protection capabilities.

Together, Cato says that with these innovations, it is delivering the first secure access service edge platform purpose-built to secure the AI era.

“AI is changing both sides of the equation: the threats we face and the defenses we need,” explains Matan Getz, vice president of AI security at Cato Networks. “With Cato Neural Edge and Cato AI Security, we are empowering enterprises to strengthen AI-driven defense and govern enterprise AI without sacrificing performance or adding operational complexity.”

Traditional security controls were built to inspect files, user behavior and application access, not the conversational and contextual interactions of AI prompts, chats, copilots and agents. Cato argues that delivering security for AI and AI for security at scale requires significant compute power capable of deep semantic analysis and large-scale model execution. To secure AI transformation, it says, enterprises must evolve both their security controls and the infrastructure powering them.

Cato Neural Edge is addressing the AI infrastructure challenge through a GPU-powered enforcement layer embedded within more than 85 points of presence of Cato’s global private backbone. The new offering executes intelligence and enforcement in the Cato PoP, providing predictable performance and architectural integrity and differs from existing architectures that offload AI inspection to separate hyperscale environments.

The new service allows for high-frequency execution of AI and machine learning models inline, real-time semantic and behavioral inspection, scalable analysis across global traffic flows and deterministic performance without external processing layers.

The second new release today, Cato AI Security, unifies AI governmence and runtime protection across major AI use cases and governs employee use of AI tools, secures homegrown AI applications and enforces guardrails for autonomous AI agents.

Cato AI Security offers a unified control panel and policy engine to allow enterprises to secure AI transformation while providing a seamless path forward to broader network and security initiatives such as software-defined wide area networks, security service edge and universal zero-trust network access.

“One of the biggest advantages for us is that AI security isn’t another console or separate enforcement layer. It’s built directly into the Cato SASE Platform,” said Marc Crudgington, vice president of cybersecurity and IT infrastructure at Crane Worldwide Logistics LLC. “We can govern AI usage, secure homegrown AI applications, and manage agent workflows using the same policy engine and data lake that already protect our network and cloud environments.”

Both Cato AI Security and Cato Neural Edge are now available to Cato Networks customers.

Image: Cato Networks