Nordic's leading consumer electronics retailer removes the stress of Black Friday by replacing 860+ security appliances with Cato's cloud-native SASE architecture.
TEL AVIV, Israel, April 29, 2025 /PRNewswire/ -- Cato Networks, the SASE leader, today announced that Elkjøp, the largest electronics retailer in the Nordics, has adopted the Cato SASE Cloud Platform to secure and connect its 420 stores and 10,000 employees across Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland. The Elkjøp IT team began its Cato rollout before the peak season on Black Friday (Friday, November 29, 2024). It found that the Cato SASE Cloud Platform significantly improved IT readiness during this critical retail period.
"We were able to eliminate half the pre-season readiness checks, and all of our emergency IT trips to the stores with the Cato SASE Cloud Platform," says Reno Dokken, Infrastructure Manager at Elkjøp. "Cato showed us that it's possible to solve a complex problem elegantly, leaving us more time to evaluate other aspects of our IT portfolio."
From Legacy Constraints to Seamless Scalability
Six years ago, Elkjøp began modernizing its point-of-sale system, adopting cloud infrastructure. The existing infrastructure-multiple security systems managed by separate vendors and an aging MPLS network-was poorly suited for this cloud deployment. The many security solutions led to delays in implementing security policies, and even simple network changes could take weeks to fulfill. With Cato, Elkjøp overcame those challenges and a whole lot more. More specifically, Elkjøp realized benefits including:
- Improved Agility, Fast Deployment: By leveraging automated provisioning, centralized management, and a structured deployment strategy, Elkjøp transitioned more than 420 stores to Cato within several months. Change management was dramatically improved. "With our old infrastructure, a simple network change could take six weeks," said Dokken. "With Cato, we do it in seconds."
- Strengthened Security and Streamlined Operation: By converging networking and security into a single cloud platform, Elkjøp replaced 860+ firewalls, proxy servers, and Internet load balancers along with additional network infrastructure services and equipment. The result: streamlined management, increased visibility, and enhanced protection through advanced features like TLS Inspection, IPS, and secure web gateway (SWG) capabilities.
- Increased Employee Productivity: Remote workers have a smoother and more secure remote experience. "For the first time, I have developers asking for network access because 'it just works so smoothly' with Cato," said Dokken.
- A Game-Changer for Peak Season Resilience: During the 2024 holiday season-Elkjøp's first with Cato fully in production-the IT team reduced pre-season readiness checks by half. Cato's automated failover and traffic rerouting ensured uninterrupted service across all stores, removing the need for on-call vendor coordination or emergency travel to physical locations "With Cato, I slept better during peak season," said Dokken.
Resources
- [Case Study] From 6 Weeks to 6 Seconds: How Elkjøp Improved Agility, Increased Security, and Thrived During Black Friday with the Cato SASE Cloud Platform
- [Blog] No More Black Friday Fire Drills: How Elkjøp Transformed Retail IT with Cato
About Cato Networks
Cato Networks delivers enterprise security and networking in a single cloud platform. The SASE leader creates a seamless and elegant customer experience that effortlessly enables threat prevention, data protection, and timely incident detection and response. With Cato, organizations replace costly and rigid legacy infrastructure with an open and modular SASE architecture based on SD-WAN, a purpose-built global cloud network, and an embedded cloud-native security stack.
Want to learn why thousands of organizations secure their future with Cato? Visit us at www.catonetworks.com
Media Contact:
Cato Communications
press@catonetworks.com
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