Intronis MSP Solutions, a division of Barracuda Networks Inc. with headquarters in Chelmsford, Mass., has added versions of its subscription-based firewall solution for virtualized and public cloud environments.
The new editions of Barracuda NextGen Firewall—Intronis MSP Edition supplement the capabilities of a product line that debuted in June. That initial release was a physical appliance for protecting on-premises resources. Effective today, managed service providers can use the same technology to safeguard servers and workstations running on the VMware vSphere, Microsoft Hyper-V, Citrix XenServer, and KVM virtualization platforms, as well as cloud-based solutions hosted on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform.
“It’s the same product. It’s the same architecture. It’s just different deployment options,” says Neal Bradbury, senior director of business development at Intronis.
That means no additional training burdens for Intronis partners, he continues. All three versions of the solution share a common management interface as well, so MSPs can administer their onsite, virtual, and cloud-based firewalls in one place.
Like the original on-premises release, the virtual and cloud editions feature subscription-based pricing that enables MSPs to ease cash flow challenges by paying for firewalls via the same monthly fees they charge customers. Bradbury declined to provide specific information on rates, but called them similar across editions.
“It’s very, very comparable,” he said.
Both the virtual and cloud firewalls introduced today offer WAN optimization technology aimed at maximizing performance and availability over remote connections.
Barracuda bought Intronis in September 2015 in a bid to increase adoption of its solutions among managed service providers. Intronis has been rolling out subscription-priced versions of Barracuda products suited to the MSP market’s recurring revenue business model since last March, when it officially re-branded as Intronis MSP Solutions.
According to Bradbury, those “Intronis MSP Edition” offerings combine well with solutions like Barracuda Essentials for Office 365, the email security, compliance archiving, and cloud-to-cloud backup service that Barracuda launched a year ago, to form service bundles that Intronis partners can use to serve legacy backup customers in new ways.
“It’s just a logical extension for them to take what they were doing with Intronis on the backup side and being able to kind of expand into security on the email and from there to segue into firewall,” he says.
The virtual and cloud versions of Barracuda NextGen Firewall—Intronis MSP Edition are available immediately in North America and Europe.
