Barracuda has added new zero-trust capabilities to its portfolio of security and backup solutions, and rolled out new integration between its managed XDR solution and next-generation firewall.
The company made those and other announcements during its Secured.22 customer conference, which takes place online today and tomorrow.
New functionality in CloudGen Access, Barracuda’s zero-trust network access (ZTNA) solution, is designed to strengthen protection against malicious websites and applications by allowing organizations to limit users to specific DNS addresses or forbid access to banned addresses.
Administrators can apply access policies to individual users, user groups, and device groups both in the office and remotely. The system supports time-specific and location-based rules as well.
Barracuda has also incorporated ZTNA functionality from CloudGen Access into the Premium Plus edition of its Barracuda Email Protection for Microsoft 365 offering, allowing end users to safeguard inboxes and networks simultaneously through a single solution.
“It enables a user to simplify their purchasing,” notes Brian Babineau, Barracuda’s chief customer officer. “We have an email security and [network] protection portfolio that you can buy all at once.”
In addition, users can now purchase Barracuda CloudGen Access on both the AWS and Microsoft Azure Marketplaces through the same billing mechanisms they use to buy other cloud-based solutions from those providers.
New integration between Barracuda XDR and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall gives analysts at the vendor’s SOC deeper insights into the real-time threat data it already collects from endpoint, server, and network security systems, as well as third-party firewalls.
“We now can help prioritize all the data feeds and identify and triage those in a much quicker, more scalable way,” Babineau says, adding that the company will also be able to implement remediation measures, like locking out suspicious devices, more easily and often automatically.
Barracuda XDR is based on technology the company acquired in 2021 along with SKOUT Cybersecurity. Integration between that system and both Barracuda Email Protection and SentinelOne’s EDR solution rolled out early this year.
Enhancing automation and scalability, while expanding its portfolio’s capabilities, is the foundation of Barracuda’s strategy for prevailing in a crowded data protection market by providing “a lifecycle of security all the way through recovery,” Babineau says.
Adding more zero-trust functionality to its solutions is a top priority as well. According to Babineau, Barracuda views the optimal zero-trust strategy as one that compels users and devices to verify their identity while still allowing businesses to get work done.
“You can’t just go and lock everything down and say, ‘nobody can have access to anything,'” he explains. You can, however, deny access to unapproved and unidentified assets or people behaving in anomalous ways.
“If you’re trying to get access to something that you have permission to but you’re doing so from a crazy hour of the day, we’re going to prevent that from happening,” Babineau says.
Over three-quarters of organizations surveyed earlier this year by Forrester on behalf of security vendor Illumio called zero trust an important tool for combating security threats. Some 73% of participants in that study cited ZTNA as a “critical technical foundation” for their organization’s zero-trust strategy.
New business sales of Barracuda’s data protection offerings grew 30% year-over-year during the most recently completed fiscal quarter. The company currently serves more than 40,000 data protection customers worldwide.
Thoma Bravo sold Barracuda to fellow private equity investor KKR earlier this year in a deal reportedly valued at $4 billion.
