To compete in today’s retail landscape, IT must support new growth strategies while delivering seamless, secure customer experiences. This means enabling rapid store rollouts, digitizing in-store experiences, and connecting cloud-based systems across every location. Customers expect faster, more connected, and more secure interactions at every touchpoint. This puts growing pressure on IT to support cloud-based application connectivity, real-time inventory updates, and secure POS transactions across hundreds or even thousands of locations.
Legacy infrastructure wasn’t designed to handle this scale or speed. Store-by-store hardware deployments, siloed security tools, and rigid networks strain IT teams, slowing innovation, straining IT resources, and limiting the ability to adapt quickly to new store openings, customer demands, and business changes.
This shift in retail operations presents a strong opportunity for the channel. Cato SASE Cloud Platform empowers partners to guide retailers through legacy infrastructure replacements as well as long-term transformation away from point products. With centralized visibility and control, Cato simplifies operations and eliminates the complexity of managing multiple siloed tools. With Cato’s partner-first model, our partners can embed themselves across every stage of the IT journey – owning architecture decisions, delivering services, and driving long-term transformation as a trusted advisor.
What Retailers Need and Where Partners Create Value
IT Teams must deliver seamless customer experiences while managing security and cost. That means building an infrastructure that supports:
- Scalable OperationsRetailers need the agility to scale and rapidly deploy new stores without adding complexity, headcount, or relying on disjointed systems. Centralized visibility and control, paired with simplified operations, are critical to accelerating rollout and reducing IT burden.
- Always-On Connectivity: Retail organizations require resilient, low-latency connectivity to cloud and private applications that power in-store systems like POS and inventory—ensuring frictionless shopping, real-time inventory updates, and uninterrupted transactions across all channels.
- Consistent Security & Compliance: Retail must safeguard customer data, enforce consistent security policy across all locations, and meet PCI DSS requirements—while preventing threats and unauthorized access across distributed environments.
For partners, this is a chance to lead with their value, not just product fulfillment. Help retailers shift away from separate point solutions and toward a service-led model that improves agility, visibility, and control.
The Pain Points Partners Can Solve
Legacy architectures can slow store rollouts and strains IT teams resources. Hardware must be shipped, installed, and maintained at each location, driving up costs and increasing time to service.
Networks built on MPLS or unmanaged broadband introduce latency and downtime because they weren’t designed for cloud access or dynamic traffic patterns—especially across distributed retail environments – leading to disrupted POS transactions and subpar customer experiences.
Security is often inconsistent across locations and for users. Disjointed point solutions make it harder to enforce policies, manage PCI DSS scope, and protect customer data. Visibility is limited and configurations vary across tools, users, and sites.
Partners are uniquely positioned to address these challenges by delivering the Cato SASE Cloud Platform—a cloud-native solution that modernizes networking and security from store to cloud. Partners can help retailers deploy new sites faster, secure every location with a full security stack, and ensure resilient, 99.999% SLA-backed performance across their environments.
How Cato Enables Channel Success in Retail
Cato doesn’t just remove operational headaches for IT Teams—it provides partners with an efficient way to deliver connectivity speed, stability, and security at scale.
Agile Scalability
Cato enables retail IT teams to scale rapidly and deploy new stores through a single, cloud-native platform. With centralized visibility, zero-touch provisioning, and simplified management, there’s no need for on-site hardware, manual configurations, or multiple point solutions. Partners can deliver consistent, repeatable rollout experiences that reduce cost and accelerate customer timelines.
Resilient Connectivity
Cato’s global private backbone delivers 99.999% SLA-backed, low-latency performance for cloud and private apps, giving partners a dependable way to deliver network resilience across retail environments. Built-in WAN optimization supports high uptime and application responsiveness – critical for in-store systems like POS and inventory. Partners can ensure that customer-facing systems perform reliably, even during peak hours.
Consistent Security & Compliance
Cato’s full cloud-native security stack is delivered from the cloud and enforced through a single policy engine. This enables consistent inspection and control across users, stores, and devices, regardless of location. Features like Captive Portal and segmentation support PCI DSS compliance.
Cato is the first SASE platform vendor to achieve PCI DSS v4.01 Service Provider Level 1 certification, validating its ability to meet the most rigorous industry security standards. This certification ensures that retail customers benefit from strong access controls, continuous monitoring, and secure infrastructure. With these capabilities directly embedded into the platform, partners are equipped to streamline policy management for their customers and reduce operational risk.
Every Enterprise Should Want Their SASE Platform to Be PCI 4.0 Certified – Here’s Why | Read the blog
Why Cato, Why Now
Cato was designed from the ground up with partners in mind—especially those supporting fast-moving industries like retail. As a Cato partner, you operate without direct sales competition, upsell conflict, or hardware fulfillment hurdles. Instead, partners are equipped to lead with a 100% cloud-native solution that’s built for ongoing service delivery, centralized, and easily managed from the cloud. With an OpEx-based, as-a-service model and no upfront hardware investment, Cato enables partners to build recurring revenue through managed services, platform subscriptions, and ongoing opportunities for upsell, renewal, and account expansion.
Partnering with traditional vendors often means getting locked into appliance sales, razor-thin margins, and reactive support models. Cato breaks that mold. It enables partners to deliver the outcomes retailers care most about: faster store rollouts, stronger security, lower operational costs, and better customer experiences—through a single, cloud-native platform that’s simple to position and easy to support.
Most importantly, partners maintain full ownership of the customer relationship. That translates to deeper strategic engagement, predictable revenue streams, and long-term account ownership.
For partners focused on the retail space, Cato delivers what the market demands – agility, resilience, and simplicity – combined with a business model that supports scalable, sustainable partner growth.
What This Means for Partners
Retailers are ready to move beyond patchwork solutions, slow deployments, and legacy infrastructure. They’re looking for more efficient ways to scale operations, stay protected, and improve performance—without overburdening their IT staff.
With Cato, partners are equipped to lead that change. Whether a Solutions Provider, Managed Services Provider, Service Provider, or Distributor, the channel can drive IT modernization for Retail customers while building services, revenue, and relevance.
Retail transformation is happening. With Cato SASE Cloud, it’s partner-led from the start.
The post Unlock the Retail Edge: How Partners Can Lead with Cato appeared first on Cato Networks.
