Q&A: Barracuda Data Protection innovation and momentum

Today, we announced product milestones and strong business growth for our data protection business. Data Protection new business sales grew 30% year-over-year at the end of Q2FY23, and international sales grew 75% year-over-year for the same time period.

To give you a closer look at what's new and how it can help you, we sat down to talk with Shawn Lubahn, Sr. Product Manager, Infrastructure Backup at Barracuda, to get his insights on recent innovations with our data protection solutions.

Q&A with Shawn Lubahn, Sr. Product Manager

Barracuda has seen strong growth for our Data Protection solutions over the past year. What do you think is driving this growth?

One of the key drivers for Data Protection is ransomware and cyber attacks. We see a lot of customers that are reevaluating their backup strategies to make sure that their data is protected. Barracuda’s Data Protection solutions — Barracuda Backup and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup — have a number of key capabilities today to protect customer data from ransomware and there will be more to come in the near future.

There's also the shift that’s happened over the last couple of years due to the COVID-19 pandemic. More customers are working remotely, and they're shifting data and applications to the cloud, specifically to Microsoft 365. Our data protection solutions are well suited for protecting these types of hybrid cloud environments. We have Cloud-to-Cloud Backup to protect data in Microsoft 365, and Barracuda Backup is also a cloud-based solution which enables remote management, backup, and recovery of data and applications that remain on-premises.

Barracuda Data Protection has also won some impressive awards recently, including an overall win in the Data Protection category of the CRN Annual Report Card, which is based entirely on partner feedback. Why do you think partners are so excited about these solutions?

I think it’s a reflection of our mission statement, which is to help our customers protect their data securely, simply, and reliably. Our Data Protection solutions reflect that. They're designed to be extremely easy to deploy and use, protect data from ransomware, and they protect the majority of the most widely used on-premises and Microsoft 365 applications.

I think our customers and our partners appreciate how easy our solutions are to use, and that’s reflected in the awards that we've recently received.

What sets Barracuda Backup and Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup apart from competitors?

There’s something Chris King, our senior director of product management for data protection, likes to say that comes to mind when I think about what we are today and where we want to go. “Do you want to solve a puzzle, or do you want to solve a problem?”

What sets us apart is that we're not focused on solving puzzles; we're focused on solving problems for our customers. Some solutions allow you to customize every setting and let customers tinker. We are focused on solving the problem of ensuring that customer data is protected from failure, accidental or malicious deletion, disaster, and ransomware. Our solutions require very little setup time and require very little learning curve. That’s what sets Barracuda Backup and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup apart from our competitors.

What innovations has the Data Protection team made recently? How do these innovations help customers?

There are several recent highlights for our Barracuda Backup appliances. We just launched a new Barracuda Backup 1191 model, which is now our largest model at 168 terabytes of usable storage capacity. The 1191 model ensures that we can continue to grow with our customers and their growing datasets.

We have also increased the usable storage capacity of the Barracuda Backup 490  and 1091 models. The 490 model increases from 6 terabytes to 8 terabytes, while the 1091 model increases from 112 terabytes to 128 terabytes. These changes provide a better fit for customer environments and better align us competitively. This is also a value add for our customers that are subscribing to our Instant Replacement subscription and are entitled to a free hardware refresh. They’ll be able to get a new model 490 or 1091 appliance with increased capacity at no extra charge.

For Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, it starts with the launch of the latest version, which was released last year. This was a completely new build from the ground up, a cloud-based platform for protecting data and applications in Microsoft 365. Since then, we've won numerous awards for the solution. It’s one of the fastest backup and recovery solutions on the market, and it’s designed and purpose-built for backing up cloud data.

Is there anything else that you think is important for partners or customers to know?

Our goal is to protect virtual, physical, and Microsoft 365 data. We achieve this with our purpose-built Barracuda Backup appliances and our Cloud-to-Cloud Backup for Microsoft 365 solutions. Barracuda Backup protects on-premises virtual and physical environments, while Cloud-to-Cloud Backup provides protection for Microsoft 365, including Exchange Online, OneDrive, SharePoint, OneNote, and Teams data.

It's also important that our customers and partners know that we are listening to their feedback, and we are committed to protecting their data securely, simply, and reliably.

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