Just curious what everyone else thinks of Cato's Bandwidth prices for Socket Sites.
It seems to me that it is so substantially more expensive than ZTNA/SDP Users that it defeats itself.
As an example, lets consider a site with 50 users. I can license each user with ZTNA for $4, and add Threat Protection for $1. So $250 pm for that site, with no Internet bandwidth constraints, and then for connectivity use any other edge device - could be Cisco, Juniper, Ubiquiti etc
But if I replace that generic router with a Socket, then as well as the cost of the socket we have to pay for Internet-Bound traffic bandwidth. If we go with Cato's rule of thumb of 1Mbps, that's 50Mbps.
The base bandwidth is $5 per user per month - OK, a little higher than ZTNA, fair enough - but TP costs $3.80 per user per month - nearly 4 times as much. So our price is now effectively $8.80 per user per month - that is $440 per month for the exact same traffic. If these 50 users need to work from home even 1 day per week, I still need to pay $250 per month for that.
So that socket is now costing $440 per month, on top of the cost for the socket itself. Bearing in mind, it is exactly the same traffic, routed in the exact same way, the only difference is how that traffic got to the PoP.
We are working with a long term 800 user client on a Cato proposal currently, and the socket bandwidth costs nearly lost us the deal - fortunately our relationship with this client meant we got a chance to re-submit the proposal without the sockets, retaining their existing firewalls, and it looks like we will win the deal.
It would make sense if Internet Bound traffic wasn't counted, as is the case with ZTNA users, but it is.
