Case Study: Arlington Orthopedic Associates achieves lean, secure cloud SD‑WAN and eliminates MPLS and branch appliances with Cato Networks

Arlington Orthopedics Replaces Carrier-Managed SD-WAN Service

Arlington Orthopedic Associates, one of the largest orthopedic practices in North Texas, needed to nearly double its regional network while keeping IT lean and cutting costs. Their environment relied on 100 Mbits/s MPLS (costing about $10,000/month), distributed firewall appliances, and meshed VPNs that were slow to deploy (90‑day new‑office windows), hard to troubleshoot, and required specialist staffing. To address this, they trialed Cato Networks’ Cato Cloud SD‑WAN service (with zero‑touch Cato Sockets and built‑in security/FWaaS).

Cato Networks delivered Cato Cloud and preconfigured Cato Sockets that installed in minutes, allowing Arlington to transition most offices off MPLS, retire many branch appliances, and deploy new sites in minutes rather than months. The converged SD‑WAN + security gave a single pane of glass for visibility and control (identifying user/device traffic such as Netflix), automatic PoP failover, and a simple DR site on the same WAN. The result: nearly doubled the network without expanding IT headcount, eliminated ongoing MPLS expense and appliance complexity, and freed budget and resources for front‑line IT projects.

Arlington Orthopedic Associates

George McNeill

Director of IT