Barracuda Networks has consolidated and retooled its email security plans for Microsoft 365.
A new set of options introduced today replaces the three tiers of service provided by the Barracuda Essentials suite, as well as the vendor’s Total Email Security and Total Email Protection plans, with three new plans: Email Protection Advanced, Email Protection Premium, and Email Protection Premium Plus. All three plans are priced on a per user, per year basis.
“It’s an opportunity for us to really streamline our packaging and bring some new offers to the table that are really well aligned to how our customers want to consume our solutions,” says Mike Flouton, Barracuda’s vice president of product.
The entry-level Advanced plan offers protection from viruses, spam, and malicious attachments, among other threats, and includes encryption, data loss prevention, and emergency mailbox services.
“It’s our best email security, everything you need and nothing you don’t,” Flouton says.
The Premium plan adds threat hunting and response, domain fraud protection, DNS filtering, and integration with SIEM, SOAR, and XDR solutions, along with the automated incident response workflow functionality Barracuda introduced in September.
The Premium Plus plan includes everything in Premium as well as cloud-to-cloud backup, cloud archiving, and security awareness training. It also comes with Data Inspector, a recently introduced data classification and protection system that searches end user environments for personal identifiable information, user credentials, and credit card numbers, among other content categories, as well as malicious files.
Data Inspector, DNS filtering, automated incident response, and SIEM/SOAR/XDR integration are all new additions to Barracuda’s email security plans. “We wanted to take this opportunity to really just do a re-imagining of the portfolio,” Flouton says.
According to Barracuda, all three Email Protection plans are valuable supplements to Microsoft’s Defender for Office 365 email filtering service. While that product includes gateway-based protection from phishing, impersonation, and business email compromise attacks, for example, the new Barracuda Email Protection plans come with an API-based version of that capability that catches threats Defender sometimes misses.
“We feel like phishing and impersonation are just such a pervasive threat that every organization needs a combination of gateway and API-based approaches,” Flouton says.
Barracuda based its new email security lineup on input from end users about which capabilities they consider must-haves and which should be optional. “We took a research-based approach to this,” Flouton says. “We actually surveyed hundreds of customers and non-customers.”
Though new email security customers will be steered to one of the Email Protection plans unveiled today, existing Essentials, Total Email Security, and Total Email Protection subscribers can continue using and renewing those plans indefinitely.
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