Barracuda Network and Application Security

Security, Access, and Reliability for Cloud-Connected Networks and Applications

Traditional security strategies and firewalls were never intended for today’s cloud-integrated infrastructures and workloads. They can’t give branch offices direct access to your cloud applications. They often don’t support cloud-friendly consumption models, and they don’t have the scalability and flexibility that cloud-hosted applications demand.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls and Web Application Firewalls are the industry’s first solutions purpose-built for securing cloud-connected networks. They protect all your users, applications, and data – regardless of what your infrastructure looks like. They ensure secure and reliable connections among multiple sites on premises and the cloud with consumption-based pricing, saving you money on infrastructure costs.

Learn more and request a free trial.

Coming to Terms with the Good, Bad and Ugly of Cyber Insurance

November 9, 2018 by Mike Vizard

It would appear business executives are finally getting the message when it comes to appreciating the risks associated with cybersecurity. The cyber insurance market is booming. A report from CyberPolicy, an online cyber insurance marketplace, finds the number of cyber insurance policies being taken out increased on average 69 percent per quarter over the last year.

'Nearly half (46%) of SMBs cited contractual requirements as being the main reason for buying cyber insurance.' ~@MVizardClick To Tweet

The primary drivers of that growth are two-fold. The first is the price of cyber insurance is falling as more customers seek it. The CyberPolicy report finds that in April of 2017, the average monthly premium for a $1 million limit policy was $271 per month. In June 2018, the same $1 million policy limit, but with more comprehensive coverage, went for only $77 per month. The report also notes first-time cyber insurance shoppers are on the rise among SMB owners, experiencing a quarterly growth of 34 percent over the last year. CyberPolicy customers are also requesting higher insurance limits, with 90 percent of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) purchasing policies with coverage limits between $1 and $5 million.

Mike Vizard

Mike Vizard has covered IT for more than 25 years, and has edited or contributed to a number of tech publications including InfoWorld, eWeek, CRN, Baseline, ComputerWorld, TMCNet and Digital Review. He currently blogs for IT Business Edge and contributes to CIOinsight, The Channel Insider, Programmableweb and Slashdot. Mike also blogs about emerging cloud technology for SmarterMSP.

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvizard

Barracuda and Microsoft – Pure Gold

November 6, 2018 by Rich Turner

Microsoft has just launched another partnership tier – Gold ISV – and Barracuda has achieved this latest Microsoft competency. We have been a Gold Application Development Partner since the partnership tiers were first formed, and last year we became a Gold Cloud Platform partner.

Barracuda public cloud teams are excited to announce that Barracuda has achieved the Microsoft Gold ISV competency. Barracuda is also a Gold Application Development and Gold Cloud Platform Partner.Click To Tweet

While it’s always great, of course, to be recognized by Microsoft, this is also important for our partners and customers because it demonstrates our ongoing commitment and relationship with Microsoft. We work closely across many different departments and engineering groups at Microsoft to ensure our solutions remain cutting-edge and provide great value to our customers. With a company as large as Microsoft – they have 131,000 employees and recorded sales of $110 Billion last year – this is no easy feat, but we are passionate about this relationship – and very proud to be recognized as “Gold” in these three key categories.

Rich Turner

Rich is the Product Marketing Manager, Information Management. He's been with Barracuda since the acquisition of C2C Systems in 2014. Rich specializes in cloud-deployed solutions, information management, and archiving systems. His experience includes extensive work on OEM opportunities and the legal community.

If you'd like to get in touch with Rich, you can connect with him on LinkedIn and follow him on Twitter.

You can email Rich at rturner@barracuda.com.

Yelp for IT

November 5, 2018 by Anthony Kros

I’ve used Yelp to help my wife and I choose everything from restaurants (invaluable!) to plumbers to cobblers (no lie). It’s a great way to gain insights into the typical customer experience without actually going to the business and taking your chances. Now, it is true that you have to take some ratings with a grain of salt. Was a bad rating the product of an actual subpar experience or is someone just trying to cause trouble? Likewise, is a good rating just some friends of the owners trying to pump up a newly opened business? Like all things, the rating should be just one aspect that helps you make your decision.

Gartner Peer Insights can help you make better buying decisions. Think of it as Yelp for IT.Click To Tweet

[Read more…] about Yelp for IT

Anthony Kros

Anthony (Tony) Kros is the Analyst Relations Manager for Barracuda. Connect with him on LinkedIn here.

https://www.barracuda.com

Time to Come to Terms with the Impact AI Will Have on Cybersecurity

November 2, 2018 by Mike Vizard

It’s now only a matter of time before cybercriminals start to leverage artificial intelligence (AI) to both create and launch attacks that will become much more targeted. Cybercriminals already have the bots required to collect the data required to build AI models. They can also afford to recruit the expertise needed to build AI models. There are already any number of nation states that it would be safe to assume are already using AI to further their cyberespionage aims.

A recent report reveals that 82% of cybersecurity professionals are concerned about the possibility of cybercriminals using AI in attacks against their businesses ~@mvizard Click To Tweet

Mike Vizard

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvizard

Can MSPs find profit in the public sector?

October 30, 2018 by Neal Bradbury

States, cities, counties, and other government entities are increasingly turning to cloud-based services to help reign in their IT spending and increase their flexibility. That presents an opportunity for MSPs looking to expand their client base, but are these public sector customers worth the effort (and bureaucratic hoops) that come along with these contracts?

State and local governments are indeed willing to spend some money on services. According to Gartner, government use of public cloud services will grow 17.1 percent annually, on average, through 2021. Further, local governments currently spend 20.6 percent of their IT budgets on the cloud, which is roughly equal to the private sector.

The BitPaymer ransomware attack in Matanuska-Susitna affected local libraries, animal care, the landfill, municipal e-commerce, the phones, and more. -Neal Bradbury, @BarracudaMSP Click To Tweet

There is a need in the market for better IT service, security, and storage options. Many municipalities, particularly smaller ones, suffer from the same lack of IT resources that small and midsize businesses face. That means the IT staff they do have are stretched thin, and they are often vulnerable to cyberattacks that can have far-reaching consequences.

Neal Bradbury

Neal Bradbury is Senior Director of Business Development for Barracuda MSP, a provider of security and data protection solutions for managed services providers, where he is responsible for generating greater business value for the company’s MSP partner community and alliance partners.

http://www.barracudamsp.com

Cathay Pacific Breach Illustrates How Rising Tide of Security Breaches Takes Toll on Business

October 26, 2018 by Mike Vizard

It’s starting to feel like there is now a major data security breach being revealed every other day. This week it was Cathay Pacific’s turn to reveal that the personal data of some 9.4 million customers had been compromised. Data involving passenger names, nationalities, dates of birth, telephone numbers, email, physical addresses, numbers for passports, identity cards and frequent-flier programs, and historical travel information were all affected along with several hundred credit card numbers.

'A recent survey finds 83% of consumers will stop spending with a business for several months in the immediate aftermath of a security breach or a hack. Over a fifth (21%) of consumers will never return.' ~@MVizard Click To Tweet

Mike Vizard

Connect with Mike on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Google+.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelvizard

SD-WAN and the End of Hub-and-Spoke

October 25, 2018 by Tony Burgess

This is the final piece in a four-part series by Tony Burgess: SD-WAN, IoT, and the disruptor taking aim at the enterprise firewall market. You can read the series in its entirety here.

Over the past decade, internet traffic has only continued to grow in both volume and importance. Today, even the largest and fastest ASIC firewalls are reaching the limits of their capacity, and causing increasingly intolerable latency in enterprise networks. Global organizations no longer count on bigger data centers and fatter pipes to connect a single huge network. Instead, they scale by initiating new availability zones and regions optimized to provide local business continuity and quality of service. Compute and storage resources are auto-scaled for efficiency, and even global databases are adapting with distributed and eventual-consistency models.

'With SD-WAN done right, every remote location and every IoT device gets its own internet breakout, and its own full-featured firewall.' Get more on SD-WAN & IoT history in this Barracuda Blog post by Tony BurgessClick To Tweet

Tony Burgess

Tony Burgess is a twenty-year veteran of the IT security industry and is Barracuda’s Senior Copywriter for Content and Customer Marketing. In this role, he researches complex technical subjects and translates findings into clear, useful, human-readable prose.

You can connect with Tony on LinkedIn here.

https://www.barracuda.com

Security top concern for organizations transitioning to SD-WAN

October 25, 2018 by Christine Barry

We're excited to announce that we've recently completed a global study on SD-WAN adoption in business, and the results are now available to the public. As we've often done in the past, Barracuda commissioned Vanson Bourne to conduct the study and compile the stats that informed our conclusions. This particular survey polled IT leaders and network and security professionals on topics surrounding WAN connectivity and SD-WAN as a solution to their Wide Area Networks. Klaus Gheri has blogged about the EMEA region results here, and the global and regional white papers are available here. This blog post will look at some of the US and global results. For complete results, visit our website here to download a white paper.

First let's start with some background. Secure SD-WAN is an area of strong interest for Barracuda. While we do not offer a pure-play SD-WAN solution, the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall provides Secure SD-WAN capabilities. In a pure-play scenario, the SD-WAN solution provides some traffic optimization and link and load balancing, and in most cases it requires a separate security solution. This can increase complexity and costs, and often prevents any type of centralized management and policy enforcement.

Christine Barry

Christine Barry is Senior Chief Blogger and Social Media Manager at Barracuda. In this role, she helps bring Barracuda stories to life and facilitate communication between the public and Barracuda internal teams. Prior to joining Barracuda, Christine was a field engineer and project manager for K12 and SMB clients for over 15 years. She holds several technology credentials, a Bachelor of Arts, and a Master of Business Administration. She is a graduate of the University of Michigan.

Connect with Christine on LinkedIn and follow her on Twitter here.

https://blog.barracuda.com

EMEA businesses turn to SD-WAN in spite of lack of education

October 25, 2018 by Klaus Gheri

EMEA businesses turn to SD-WAN in spite of lack of education | SD-WAN cynicism and confusion reigns

Businesses in EMEA are significantly increasing their investment in cloud-friendly networking technologies, despite a lack of education and skill, according to the findings of a study of 410 IT and networking professionals released today by Barracuda Networks, the leader in cloud-enabled security and data protection solutions.

Key findings:

89% of EMEA organisations are either already using software defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), a technology that helps users access the cloud quickly and securely, or are considering it
The biggest driver for implementing SD-WAN is to improve application performance between locations
The IT C-suite is responsible for the most (28%) SD-WAN projects
Eight in ten (82%) EMEA organisations think that their SD-WAN solution has lived up to expectations
EMEA lags behind the rest of the world in SD-WAN knowledge: only three in ten (32.7%) fully understand SD-WAN, compared to a global average of 41%
EMEA thinks SD-WAN has been overhyped, with over half (53%) of organisations thinking it is a buzzword and won’t revolutionise networking, higher than the US (42%) and APAC (51%)
The number one issue for one in three (34%) who have deployed SD-WAN was a lack of internal skill and understanding
Four in ten (43%) think SD-WAN will replace MPLS
Almost two thirds (64%) believe there’s currently not enough SD-WAN training in their organisation

Barracuda study: reducing the risk of cyber attacks is the main focus for organisations over the next 12 months, with over half (52%) choosing it as their top priority, surpassing initiatives with AI, automation, IoT, and more. Click To Tweet

Cyber attack defence is EMEA organisations’ biggest priority

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a region where the financial and reputational cost of a data breach has never been higher, reducing the risk of cyber attacks is the main focus for organisations over the next 12 months, with over half (52%) choosing it as their top priority. This surpasses projects leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), automation and the Internet of Things (IoT), proving that businesses realise the importance of getting security right before embarking on more innovation-led development.

Klaus Gheri

SD-WAN, IoT, and the disruptor taking aim at the enterprise firewall market – the road less traveled

October 24, 2018 by Tony Burgess

This is the third in a series of four posts by Tony Burgess. You can follow the series as it's published here.

Barracuda never did go down the ASIC road, in part because they weren’t trying to compete in the large enterprise market. Instead, they’ve always used generic chipsets that can execute any program. And it’s worth noting that ASIC design requires you to keep the core functionality unchanged and to address new requirements with bolt-on additions—which are often kludgy, and always costly. Traditional coding, on the other hand, encourages the active development of improvements and refinements to existing solutions, since even the most basic code can be edited easily.

Barracuda's proprietary #VPN protocol, TINA effectively virtualizes your network's #transport resources and lets you mold them freely to your needs. ~Tony Burgess Click To Tweet

Tony Burgess

You can connect with Tony on LinkedIn here.

https://www.barracuda.com

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Barracuda Network and Application Security