Introducing Managed Workplace 12 SP2

Barracuda MSP is excited to introduce the latest release of its security-centric RMM tool, Managed Workplace. The release of Managed Workplace 12 SP2 highlights Barracuda MSP’s continual effort to innovate and to provide an easy-to-use, easy-to-manage cybersecurity ecosystem for our partners enabling them to more effectively deliver managed security services to their customers.

I caught up with Mark Whiffen, Senior Product Manager of Managed Workplace RMM, to learn more about this new release.

Q&A with Mark Whiffen, Senior Product Manager

Q: Mark, can you tell us a bit about what is new in Managed Workplace 12 SP2?

A: We managed to pack quite a bit into this release. The key new features and enhancements include: SOC 2 type II certification, a new Central Dashboard view, integration with our advanced web security solution, Barracuda Content Shield, and a new integration technology layer that will allow us to go-to-market faster with our Barracuda security solutions, as well as other third-party vendors.

SOC 2 audit evaluates an organization’s information systems to assure security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, and privacy of data. Compliance with SOC 2 provides peace of mind that your data is stored and transferred following strict information security policies. We are very happy to announce that Managed Workplace is certified as SOC 2 compliant, ensuring that our partners’ and their customers’ data is kept secure and confidential.

The Managed Workplace Central Dashboard offers powerful features where MSPs can, through a single view, see the status of their managed sites, view and manage critical alerts, filter on their sites and devices, and more. To provide higher efficiency to our partners, we introduced a new Central Dashboard view, which partners can currently try out as a BETA version. Partners can activate the BETA Central Dashboard straight from the Central Dashboard view and disable it if they wish to revert to the existing view.

The introduction of BETA testing through the product, instead of the traditional Early Adopter Programs (EAP), allows us to bring new enhancements to market faster. Now, all of our partners can be part of the feedback cycle to ensure the new feature is something that they want and can use.

The integration with Barracuda Content Shield is our first chapter to integrating Managed Workplace with the Barracuda security portfolio. In Managed Workplace 12 SP2, our partners can use Managed Workplace to monitor their Content Shield customer sites, receive alerts, leverage Managed Workplace’s integration with Professional Service Automation (PSA) tools to manage Content Shield’s alerts as trouble tickets, and generate Content Shield reporting through Managed Workplace. Essentially, once Content Shield is set up, partners can use Managed Workplace to monitor and manage it, streamlining the amounts of administrative consoles the MSPs have available to work with.

We were able to create a standard integration technology layer, paving the road for future product integrations. Now using this integration layer, we can integrate different product types that may have different technologies such as SOAP and REST APIs, different location logic such as a geographic site vs server location, or alert types like event logs to alerts. This will allow Managed Workplace to easily integrate with the different Barracuda security products and other third-party vendors and deliver the integration faster to our partners.

Q: How do you think these new features will benefit MSPs?

A: Our goal as a company is to help MSPs create service offerings that their customers’ need, deliver the services efficiently and cost effectively, and provide tools that assist them to demonstrate their value to their customers.

From the new Central Dashboard, where it provides MSPs efficiency to monitor and manage their customers’ sites, to the integration of Content Shield, which advanced web filtering may be a new service offering they can add and deliver through Managed Workplace. Our development efforts surround those core values with the purpose to help MSP partners to grow their businesses, securely.

Q: Are you able to tell us a bit about what’s to come in the future with Managed Workplace?

A: We will continue our integration efforts between Managed Workplace and Barracuda’s security portfolio and provide enhancements to Managed Workplace that will benefit our MSP partners. With the new BETA toggling capabilities, we hope to be able to provide a lot more enhancements throughout the product and allow more of our partners to test the feature before it becomes part of the product. The investments we make in security and integrations for Managed Workplace will continue to be our focus as we move forward.

Thank you, Mark, for the excellent overview of Managed Workplace 12 SP2. These are all great introductions for our MSP partners. Visit our website if you are interested in learning more about Managed Workplace.