Case Study: Universal Mental Health Services achieves branch firewall elimination with Cato Networks

Universal Mental Health Services Eliminates Branch Firewalls

Universal Mental Health Services (UMHS), a North Carolina–based behavioral health organization with 13 locations and about 900 employees, struggled with a mixed WAN of expensive MPLS and five SonicWALL site‑to‑site VPN branches that created a complex, hard‑to‑manage mesh. Firmware updates caused outages, policy management was inflexible, and some sites were outside MPLS coverage — so UMHS evaluated and selected Cato Networks’ cloud SD‑WAN (deploying Cato Sockets and the Cato Cloud) to address these issues.

Cato Networks implemented an IPsec tunnel from the datacenter and replaced branch SonicWALL appliances with Cato Sockets, moving traffic onto the Cato Cloud. The change eliminated branch firewalls and connectivity issues, simplified policy and security enforcement across all sites, and removed the need for frequent hardware upgrades and patches; setup took about five minutes per location. UMHS reports cost savings and plans to migrate all MPLS locations to Cato (13 sites total), with an internal analysis projecting savings of thousands of dollars.

Universal Mental Health Services

Leslie W. Cothren

Information Technology Director