Barracuda Networks has introduced a cloud-native SASE platform, simplified incident response functionality, and a new tool for securing sensitive data in Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive.
The SASE platform incorporates the vendor’s Content Shield, CloudGen Access, CloudGen WAN, and CloudGen Firewall products to provide SD-WAN, firewall-as-a-service, zero-trust network access (ZTNA), and secure web gateway functionality in the cloud, in the office, or on the device.
In support of that vision, Barracuda has added the ability to run security services on cloud hubs as well as directly on onsite devices to CloudGen Firewall.
“It’s very, very comprehensive,” says Tim Jefferson, Barracuda’s senior vice president of data protection and network and application security, of the company’s SASE strategy. “We can do enforcement at the branch office and then for traffic that does need inspection enforcement at the cloud edge, we can provide that as well.”
The result, he continues, is greater agility than cloud-only SASE platforms from competing vendors offer. “We’re saying, ‘Hey, if you want to do all your inspection at the cloud edge, you can. If you want to do inspections at the branch office, you can. If you want to do them both, you can.'”
In conjunction with the SASE unveiling, Barracuda has also integrated its ZTNA product, Barracuda CloudGen Access, with its secure web gateway product, Barracuda Content Shield to free businesses from performing all of their web filtering in the cloud.
“From a single solution now, they can get the zero-trust network access capability as well as web filtering on the device,” Jefferson says.
Barracuda’s longer-term plan, he adds, is to drive further integration among its SASE solutions. “We are aggressively folding in a number of different products into a single management experience,” he says.
The global SASE market will grow at a 116% CAGR through 2024 to $5.1 billion, according to analyst Dell’Oro Group. Data published today by Barracuda in a new state of network security report, meanwhile, suggests that 96% of organizations are either using or planning to use SD-WAN and ZTNA solutions, both of which are core SASE components.
Barracuda’s new incident response functionality, which is delivered via its Total Email Protection solution, turns a system that could previously perform one action on messages meeting one condition into a more robust “workflow engine” with granular search criteria and mix-and-match mitigation capabilities.
“You can express complex conditions about what happened, and you can express multiple actions for what to do in response,” says Senior Vice President of Engineering and Product Don MacLennan. Those actions include deleting, quarantining, moving, or issuing alerts about compromised emails.
To make utilizing that functionality simpler, Barracuda Total Email Protection now includes a graphical, drag-and-drop workflow definition tool. “There’s no programming involved,” MacLennan says.
Barracuda has also introduced new public-facing APIs that let organizations and MSPs share incident response data with SIEM, XDR, and other applications. In the past, integration was limited to a defined set of popular third-party solutions via “connectors” created by Barracuda itself. “The public documented API gives anybody else the ability to do that for themselves,” MacLennan notes.
The new data classification and protection system Barracuda launched today, called Data Inspector, searches Microsoft SharePoint and OneDrive environments for specific categories of content such as personal identifiable information, user credentials, and credit card numbers, as well as malicious files.
The product comes with built-in support for over 130 specific kinds of data in widely used formats, like driver’s license numbers and passport numbers. Users can supplement those classifications with custom ones as well. Integrated optical character recognition functionality enables Data Inspector to find matches in images or .PDF files in addition to documents, spreadsheets, and presentations.
According to Jefferson, MSPs and IT departments can use the system’s reports to gain a complete picture of what sensitive data their customers have and where that data resides. “One of the most important things they have to figure out is their risk posture,” he says. “What kind of data are we storing?”
Acting on user input, Barracuda also equipped Data Inspector to implement automated, pre-defined responses when it finds a match as well. “They didn’t want another tool that just show them all their risks,” Jefferson says.
Barracuda Data Inspector will ship on October 1st. The per user, per month prices will not factor in how much data the system processes.
The enhanced capabilities Barracuda introduced today build on the company’s earlier move into the XDR market through its acquisition of SKOUT Cybersecurity.
