How BMAT Schools Trust stays ahead of cyberthreats with Barracuda

Cyberattacks in education are becoming more frequent — and more sophisticated. For BMAT, a UK multi-academy trust supporting 12 schools and over 7,000 staff and students across Essex and East London, staying ahead of those threats is a daily challenge.

With a small IT team and a growing number of devices to manage, BMAT needed a solution that could protect their environment without adding to their workload. That’s where Barracuda came in. Get the full case study here.

The Challenge: Targeted attacks and limited bandwidth

BMAT’s IT Director, Roger O’Connor, saw a troubling trend: spear phishing emails, spoofed to look like they came from senior leadership, targeting finance staff with alarming precision.

“Spear phishing targeted at specific individuals in our finance department, spoofed to come from the CEO or CFO, is our biggest risk at the moment. People are obviously doing their homework about the organization to understand who the core staff and decision-makers are.”
— Roger O’Connor, IT Director, BMAT

After a credential phishing incident in early 2025, Roger knew it was time to strengthen their defenses.

The Solution: Barracuda Email Protection and Managed XDR

Barracuda Email Protection offered BMAT a smarter way to detect and block threats, using AI to learn communication patterns and flag suspicious activity. The platform’s incident response capabilities made it easy to remove malicious emails from inboxes quickly, reducing the risk of further compromise.

To complement that, BMAT added Barracuda Managed XDR, which provides 24/7 monitoring and rapid threat detection across endpoints, cloud, network, email and servers. With Barracuda’s Security Operations Center (SOC) team on call, BMAT could respond to threats in minutes rather than hours.

“We felt that Barracuda and the SOC team could do a lot of the leg work, meaning we wouldn’t have to micromanage that particular element of security. As soon as we received a Barracuda recommendation, and we had the demonstration, we were sold.”
— Roger O’Connor

The impact: Time saved, risks reduced

Senior IT Technician Callum Lane found the setup process refreshingly simple. Within weeks, Barracuda Managed XDR flagged a high-risk malware upload via a student account — something that might have gone unnoticed otherwise.

“It was detected, and we received a phone call from the SOC team at Barracuda pretty much instantaneously. We were able to then disable the account and any other accounts that the file was shared with. I was actually in a server room at one of the sites at the time. So, it would have been a few hours before I got back to my desk and was able to check the dashboard.”
— Callum Lane

Thanks to Barracuda, BMAT’s IT team now has more time to focus on infrastructure upgrades, and leadership has peace of mind knowing threats are being handled — even in the middle of the night.

Get the whole story

That’s just a sampling of the benefits Roger and his team are enjoying since implementing Barracuda Email Protection and Managed XDR. To get all the details, download the customer success story now.