Congratulations to Nath for winning the Cato SWIFT award for community excellence and achievement for December 2025!
Name and Job Title
Nathan, Network Engineer
How long have you been in IT/Software/Cybersecurity?
I’ve been working in IT for just over seven years, building up experience across networking, security, and infrastructure. Most of that time has been focused on enterprise network operations and secure connectivity.
What’s your favorite part of your job right now?
The favourite part of my job is implementing new Cato features, especially when they’re ones we’ve been waiting for via the roadmap, or that originated from our own feature requests (there's been a few!). It’s always satisfying to see those improvements come to life and make a real impact in production.
How long have you worked with Cato?
I’ve worked with Cato for around four and a half years. I was involved in the initial selection of Cato as our SD-WAN/SASE vendor and played a key role in implementing the migration. Since then, I’ve continued to stay hands-on with the platform through operations, feature testing, and early access programs.
What is the number one thing Cato has helped you achieve?
Cato has given us a true single pane of glass for managing our network and security policies. Users now get a consistent experience wherever they connect from, with the same policies applied globally. It’s brought real consistency and simplification across the environment, and troubleshooting issues is now much quicker and easier. We still get the occasional incident that initially stumps up - but MTTR is significantly less)
What do you want to see more of on the Cato Connect Community?
I’d love to see more technical deep-dives and interactive sessions around upcoming features — for example, workshops where Cato shares what’s on the roadmap and customers can give input on how those features might impact their environments or influence GUI design.
Real-world deployment stories or troubleshooting case studies from other customers would also be great to learn from - especially because there are so many legacy topologies out there that necessitate a different migration approach than which was necessary for us.
What do you do for fun when you’re not working?
I recently completed a part-time Masters degree in Advanced Networking, which was challenging but really rewarding. Outside of that, I’m a bodybuilder and train in the gym around six times a week — it’s a big part of my lifestyle. I also enjoy playing the piano as a creative outlet away from work and training.
Any other comments/stories/anything else you’d like to say?
I’ve really enjoyed being on the Cato journey. As a customer, we joined around four and a half years ago, and the progress since then has been incredible. Big shout-out to the Cato Support team — they’re phenomenal. Always responsive, helpful, and quick to get issues escalated to the right team and resolved promptly.
Thank you so much for being such a big part of our Cato Connect Community journey! We appreciate you and enjoy watching you learn and grow on Cato Connect and beyond :)
Community Manager
