Darling Ingredients Replaces Three Security and Networking Vendors with Cato Networks, Adopts SASE Platform

Key Takeaways

• Darling Ingredients replaced three security and networking vendors with a single SASE platform
• The company reports more than $750,000 in annual operational savings from consolidation
• Critical incident response requirements dropped by up to 83 percent

Darling Ingredients’ decision to overhaul its sprawling security and networking stack offers a revealing snapshot of how large, distributed enterprises are rethinking infrastructure in 2026. It’s not just about tools anymore. It’s about manageability, visibility gaps, and the increasingly expensive reality of fragmented architectures that were built piece by piece over many years.

Here’s the thing: organizations with hundreds of global sites often end up with layers of legacy platforms, each solving a problem at a moment in time but collectively creating operational drag. Darling Ingredients, one of the largest processors of animal-based and food waste materials, found itself in exactly that position.

The company had been managing SD-WAN, physical and virtual firewalls, URL filtering, and VPN services across three different vendors and four separate consoles. Over 260 sites, 16,000 employees, and numerous data centers and private PoPs were tied into that web. It worked, in the sense that traffic flowed and security controls existed, but the operational burden mounted. A familiar story for IT teams juggling multi-vendor ecosystems.

By selecting the Cato SASE Platform, Darling Ingredients consolidated all of that into one cloud-native environment. While SASE has been a buzzword for years, the adoption curve is now shifting from early adopters to large industrial and operational enterprises. And Darling’s results point to why that shift is accelerating.

One of the headline outcomes is financial: more than $750,000 in annual operational savings. That figure comes from eliminating overlapping vendor contracts, reducing licensing complexity, and lowering reliance on third-party contractors. Not every company sees savings that large immediately, but the pattern is consistent across SASE migrations—centralization tends to streamline both technology and staffing.

Operationally, the company reported a 66 percent reduction in the time required to compile threat activity, primarily due to the ability to evaluate and neutralize risks through a single console. Before consolidation, correlating threat events across disjointed systems could take hours. When data lives in one environment, that timeline compresses, often dramatically.

And that reduction ties back to something many CISOs struggle with: the cost of human involvement. Darling Ingredients noted that priority one incident response, historically requiring 10 to 12 people, now needs only two to three responders. That’s an 83 percent reduction in required personnel for the most urgent tasks. It doesn’t just trim operational load—it helps ensure that the right people are able to respond quickly during a critical security moment.

Of course, not every enterprise is ready to make a move like this. Some have compliance structures that tie them to specific on-premise security controls. Others worry about shifting to a single provider, or about the learning curve that comes with any major platform overhaul. Reasonable concerns. But as more organizations report measurable improvements in speed and cost once they consolidate, the equations begin to tilt.

And scale matters. Darling Ingredients operates across continents, with both traditional IT environments and industrial facilities that require predictable, secure connectivity. The more diverse the environment, the more value a unified architecture tends to bring—provided it’s implemented well. This is why SASE has evolved into more than just a security refresh. It’s become an operational strategy.

A small tangent here: the rapid rise of cloud-native networking has made older infrastructures increasingly difficult to maintain. Many companies now deal with environments that weren’t designed for modern traffic patterns, especially as remote work and IoT expand. That tension adds another layer of pressure to adopt architectures that are inherently more flexible.

The improvements reported by Darling Ingredients also highlight something often overlooked—the human experience inside IT operations. When teams move from four management consoles to one, the mental overhead drops. Troubleshooting becomes faster. Decision-making improves. And employees spend less time toggling between dashboards and more time solving problems. In other words, simplification isn’t just a technical benefit; it’s a workforce multiplier.

But will every organization see results like these? Probably not to the same degree, and that’s worth acknowledging. Enterprises with smaller footprints or those already using partially unified tools may see incremental—but still meaningful—gains. Meanwhile, companies with sprawling global infrastructures may realize even greater returns than what Darling reported.

Darling’s move underscores a broader trend: enterprises are increasingly shifting away from piecemeal architectures in favor of integrated, cloud-delivered platforms. That said, SASE adoption is not plug-and-play, and success typically hinges on planning, phased rollout, and alignment across security, networking, and operations teams.

As more industrial and global enterprises face the challenges of securing distributed workforces and complex supply chains, stories like this one are likely to become more common. The consolidation effect—fewer systems, fewer vendors, fewer operational choke points—is proving attractive not just for cost savings, but for simplicity in an otherwise complex cybersecurity era.