The new services for MSPs are around the Barracuda NextGen Firewall and Barracuda Backup Appliance, with the firewall service thought likely to generate the most demand.
Brian Babineau, General Manager, MSP Solutions, at Barracuda
Barracuda has announced new Managed Firewall and Managed Backup Appliance Professional Services offerings. These complement the MSP editions of the Barracuda NextGen Firewall and the Barracuda Backup Appliance respectively, and join the Intronis Managed ECHOplatform service that has been offered since 2015.
“These new managed firewall and managed backup appliance professional services offerings respond to the request of the market, especially on the firewall side,” said Brian Babineau, General Manager, MSP Solutions, at Barracuda. “A lot of MSPs have deployed older ASIC firewalls, which just don’t generate the same level of alerts as more advanced modern firewalls. As MSPs upgrade to these more advanced firewalls, they realize they generate a much greater volume of alerts, and the amount of management required goes up significantly. They have to train more techs in order to keep up. Some MSPs are capable of handling this themselves, but some aren’t, and those are the ones who can get the service from us. We will make it easy for them by doing management and monitoring of firewalls for them.”
The Managed Firewall service offering works with Barracuda NextGen Firewall – Intronis MSP Edition. It offers 24/7/365 security event management, notification of any qualified threat and its remediation, and alerts about any communication disruptions from onsite equipment to the MSP Solutions monitoring system. The service significantly reduces time spent on migration or configuration of the firewall and training technicians on how to manage the firewall, making it much easier for MSPs to offer next-generation firewall capabilities to their customers.
“The noise around events like WannaCry drives the need for having more sophisticated technology, but much of the market doesn’t anticipate how much more work these are,” Babineau said. “MSPs don’t need to forego providing these because they don’t have the teams to manage them 24-7.”
The new Managed Backup Appliance service offering handles the configuration of backups for Barracuda Backup – Intronis MSP Edition. It offers flexible backup for both on-premises and cloud deployments, faster recovery times, and image and file replication to a secondary appliance or to the Barracuda Cloud. It also includes monitoring backups on a 24/7/365 basis, performing corrective action on failed backups, and notifying the MSP of any communications disruptions from on-site equipment to the MSP Solutions monitoring system. A full restore can also be run upon request.
Babineau indicated that while smaller MSPs are the most obvious target for these services, they are not the only one.
“Smaller MSPs who are staffed to handle only the baseline backup or firewall and don’t have the capability to scale are likely to need the most help,” Babineau said. “However, based on our experience with the ECHOplatform service we already offer, we think it’s applicable to the entire market. Some of the larger more sophisticated and well-staffed MSPs could use these services to point the resources they would spend on them in another direction, such as cloud deployment, or managing Amazon accounts.”
The new services are available now.
