Last month we announced our Microsoft Office 365 Strategic Initiative – which shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone since Barracuda has strong roots in making Microsoft-based environments better.  It should also come as no surprise that while organizations worldwide are embracing Office 365, many are expressing reservations.  Companies have spent decades and a lot of time and money ensuring their on-premises environments were protected and productive – they are less certain about the cloud.

Some points from a recent TechValidate survey of the market illustrate this – 72 percent of respondents have concerns around, or have not yet considered, whether the native security, archiving, and compliance may not meet their organizations needs.

Office 365 features satisfy the basic needs of some organizations – they are designed to provide a full-feature platform that will appeal to most people without requiring individual customization. It is after all a multi-tenant/multi-user cloud environment, whose true value comes from the ability to interact from anywhere on any device, and leverage cloud services like Skype for Business, Yammer, SharePoint Online, and Exchange Online without the time, costs and overhead of on-premises deployments. It’s not about whether a company can run backups or perform journal archiving in the Microsoft cloud. In fact, Microsoft went to great lengths to provide companies like Barracuda with robust APIs so we could develop innovative products that would complement and enhance Office 365 and while adding additional features, functionality, and value.

Barracuda already provides products that enhance Office 365 security and productivity.  In fact, we have a wide range of security and storage products  that are available as appliances, virtual appliances, and software, that are run locally, in the cloud, or delivered as cloud-based services (SaaS).  Today, we announced a new suite of cloud services called Barracuda Essentials for Office 365, that takes three of our most popular cloud services for email security, archiving, and backup – and creates a service that offers per-user licenses, simple set-up, cloud-based management, just as Office 365 does itself.

With a rich history of protecting Microsoft environments, Barracuda is leveraging our many years of experience and expertise and excited to provide essential functionality to our customers to make sure the transition to Office 365 is seamless for your business and your users. Companies that are concerned that the basic features in Office 365 might not be sufficient for their organization can easily look to Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 to add additional layers of protection to protect their data and their Office 365 investment.  In a world where data security and protection are ever more important to not only their company but to their customers, it is important to ensure that multiple layers of protection are in place to ensure customers can operate safely and efficiently on their journey to Office 365.