Barracuda’s new scalable analytics capability was designed for the distributed enterprise, but can provide value in mid-market sized companies with several dozen locations.
Security vendor Barracuda has announced the introduction of Barracuda Firewall Insights, a new security analytics platform that ingests, aggregates, and analyzes data automatically from any Barracuda CloudGen Firewall deployed in an organization’s network, including public cloud deployments, to provide a centralized hub for critical insights and information.
“CloudGen is our next generation firewall with SD-WAN – perfect for distributed environments,” said Mike Goldgof, Senior Director of Product Marketing for Data Protection, Network and Application Security at Barracuda Networks. Our new Insights analytics platform provides a significant number of advantages over what we have been using.”
CloudGen had an analytics capability previously, but the new offering, designed in-house by Barracuda, is a major step up.
“We had the capability of doing log analysis before and doing the kinds of reports that Firewall Insights does,” Goldgof said. “The difference is that they have now all been automated. It is also much more scalable. There is also a new level of intelligence and capability that has been added. It is now designed for SD-WAN as well. There are all things that people have been asking for.”
The data provides includes dynamic availability information on SD-WAN connections, transport data, security, and web- and network-traffic details.
“It indicates things like how many security tunnels are up at the same time,” Goldgof indicated.
An organization does not require a SOC to make optimal use of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. The company does however describe it as a distributed enterprise product. Goldgof said that there are three principal use cases.
“The first is people implementing SD-WAN for massively scalable enterprises with up to thousands of locations who might be driven by cost savings this can provide,” he said. “Another use case is an organization who is moving more and more to the cloud. A third is industrial IoT infrastructure. This can handle a lot of operational technology and now we can provide an analytics solution that will show cloud managed locations for OT. An energy company that might have a bunch of locations would be a good example of a customer for this use case.”
SMBs are unlikely to have the number of locations that would benefit from the solution’s capabilities, but Goldgof said that it would be good for some midmarket organizations.
“A midmarket company with dozens of locations could use this,” he noted.
Godgof stressed as well that this will help Barracuda’s channel partners in several respects,
“It’s really a great product for the channel,” he said. “Customers have such a lack of talent and skills to manage these networks. Partners can provide a much easier way to deploy SD-WAN and do it quickly, and adding analytics allows them to better support their customers and add a lot of resources.”
