Barracuda thinks that adding these other MSP firewall options will let MSPs create strong services packages with high appeal to customers.
Neal Bradbury, Senior Director of Channel Development at Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda
Barracuda Networks has launched new versions of their firewall for both virtual environments and the public cloud. These new versions of Barracuda NextGen Firewall – Intronis MSP Edition leverage the same technology in the physical version of the firewall for MSPs that Barracuda introduced last June.
“This lets our MSPs take the same security and toolset we introduced for on-prem environments and extend it to virtual or to cloud,” said Neal Bradbury, Senior Director of Channel Development at Intronis MSP Solutions by Barracuda. “They now have all three options – all managed by one single console. This is one of the leading reasons we are doing well in MSP space, is that single platform to manage it all.”
The virtual version of the firewall covers networks running in VMware, Citrix XenServer, KVM, and Hyper-V virtualized environments. The public cloud options cover Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Service (AWS), and Google Cloud Platform public cloud deployments.
Intronis didn’t have equivalents of any of this before the Barracuda acquisition.
“Traditionally, we were a data protection company, not security,” Bradbury said. “After the acquisition, we were data protection and security. We are training our MSPs to take Fortune 500-grade security down to the markets they serve.”
Bradbury said that the seven month gap between the introduction of the on-prem firewall and the virtual and cloud options is related in logistics, and not in the need to adapt the technology for the non-physical use cases.
“The technology is basically the same in the physical model as it is in the virtual and cloud,” he said. “This was the same cycle that we follow in the backup product itself, with the others trailing the on-prem version. You can only release so much product and train teams on them so fast. We split them up so we introduce on-prem, get everyone trained on it, and now we move to virtual and cloud.”
Bradbury said that a large portion of their MSPs will be able to leverage the new options.
“Our surveys have found that a majority of our MSPs have clients who are in the public cloud,” he said.
He expects that MSPs will be able to use the new offerings to create stronger service packages.
“The kind of security present in a managed services offering really needs to be upgraded today, because of the greater danger and visibility of threats like ransomware, to which small business is particularly vulnerable,” Bradbury said. “It’s important to have everything all tied together. The virtual and cloud firewalls let MSP create that kind of service offering. They can bundle all of these into conventional service offerings like backup.”
Both the cloud and virtual versions of Barracuda NextGen Firewall – Intronis MSP Edition are available now.
