Case study: Another IT pro chooses Barracuda for the long term

Over the years, I’ve heard several versions of the same story from IT leaders working for companies that use Barracuda products. It goes something like this:

“I was in a junior position at another company that used Barracuda products, and I was hugely impressed by their advanced capabilities, ease of use, excellent support, and affordability. So later, when I got into a leadership position at this company, I made Barracuda our security vendor of choice.”

A customer success story that we published recently follows this pattern. The customer is Construction Sciences, a large Australian firm that provides services for the construction industry, including materials testing, geotechnical engineering, environmental consulting, and more. And the IT leader in this story is ICT Manager Tobye Connors.

“In 2020 our company was divested by its parent company, and that’s when I was brought on. The first order of business was to stand up an entirely new IT infrastructure from scratch. When it came to security and data protection for Microsoft 365, I knew I wanted to go with Barracuda, based on my previous five years’ experience using their solutions.”

— Tobye Connors, ICT Manager, Construction Sciences

Building a robust security platform

Tobye’s three-person team, running IT for a company with a thousand employees distributed across many locations spanning Australia and New Zealand, was facing challenges that are likely familiar to many of his peers.

• Native Microsoft security was much too cumbersome and time-consuming.
• Whatever solution they chose had to store all data within Australia for compliance.
• A lot of users in the field are not very security-savvy, making them all too vulnerable to phishing or other attacks. Plus, they tended to store documents with sensitive data in inappropriate places.
• The budget for IT investments was limited.

Tobye began with just the basics: Barracuda Email Protection with only gateway security, advanced threat protection, Microsoft 365 backup, and Cloud Archiving. But as quickly as he could get approval for further investment, he added the rest of the platform’s components. With impersonation and phishing protection that uses machine learning to detect anomalies, account takeover protection, automated incident response, and Data Inspector to find improperly stored sensitive data — along with several other capabilities — Tobye felt confident that he and his team had optimal protection for Microsoft 365.

Automation + ease of use = savings

Tobye has a lot to say about Barracuda’s ease of use and our dedication to creating an excellent user experience. But he also emphasizes the bottom-line benefits that derive from that:

“… there’s only three of us now, managing IT for 1,000 users. So, both the ease of use and the automated features like incident response mean that we’re not wasting any time. I’d say that if we were using, for instance, Microsoft security and backup and so on, I’d probably have to hire another IT person to monitor and manage that.”

— Tobye Connors, ICT Manager, Construction Sciences

Get the whole story

Get the full case study to find out all about how Tobye and his team use the different components of Barracuda Email Protection on a daily basis, and how they help to ensure Construction Sciences is fully protected against email-borne threats.