.jpg)
Shlomo Kramer: A company builder’s playbook from the frontlines of cybersecurity
The Cato Networks CEO discusses the industry’s constant reinvention and what keeps him going
As cybersecurity has gone through all these changes, you’ve been a disrupter and an incumbent. What have you learned about protecting yourself from disruption?
You need to be innovative not only from a product perspective, but also in all aspects of the organization or company you are building. For example, at Cato we saw the AI transformation coming, and we couldn't just continue to develop for it. We had to accelerate our time to market, and we did so by buying Aim Security in September 2025, our first-ever acquisition. At Imperva, following the launch of AWS in 2006, we saw that cloud was going to become a major force, so we did something radical: We created a subsidiary, called Incapsula, that could reinvent our value proposition around a cloud service and spun it out.
But even the best companies at some point reach the end of a run. Take Palo Alto Networks. It’s a fantastic company with a great portfolio of products. But we believe that what we need now is a platform company, not a portfolio of products. That creates room for a startup with a new approach. That’s the nice thing about entrepreneurship, about startup investing, and about cybersecurity.
How does AI change the game?
AI changed security. In the past, sophisticated attacks had to be engineered by humans. Now, or in the near future, attacks are going to happen on an industrialized scale, powered by attack agents. The only way to manage it at scale is to use AI to fight AI. And that's something Cato and other companies have been doing for a while.
But AI is also a completely new type of challenge. You have to make sure sensitive information is protected and be able to differentiate legitimate conversations and data from illegitimate ones. It’s why we’ve made agentic security such a priority at Cato.
