Stellar Cyber will provide increased enhanced visibility and automated incident correlation to impacted Barracuda solutions, as well as benefits specific to Barracuda MSSPs.

Today, cybersecurity vendor Barracuda Networks is announcing a new integration of its security platform with Stellar Cyber, which makes a security operations platform based on Open XDR. The initial Barracuda applications impacted by the integration are Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, Barracuda Web Application Firewall, and Barracuda Total Email Protection, although the plan is to expand this to other Barracuda solutions. The integration will provide Barracuda partners with enhanced visibility, automated incident correlation, and for MSSPs, threat hunting and remediation capabilities.

Stellar Cyber is a startup with its headquarters and engineering both in Santa Clara CA. They make an open XDR platform, and have been bringing product to market since 2015.

“We are just getting ready to be a B funding round company,” said Paul Jespersen, Senior Vice President of Global Business Development at Stellar Cyber. “We have a strong global footprint, with a tremendous amount of international revenue for a startup – about half. Our core team and investors came from NetScreen Technologies, which was acquired by Juniper in 2004. Our founder was also the founder of Aerohive, which was acquired by Extreme Networks in 2019.”

Jespersen emphasized that the problem that Stellar Cyber set out to solve related to the fact that security ops hadn’t changed dramatically in the last 20 to 30 years.

“Customers bought a SIEM, a sandbox and tools, and making it all work was hard and expensive – and particularly hard for companies outside of top tier, Fortune 200 companies,” he said “So we set out to  design and build a product to do SOCs more intelligently with machine learning, which would have many tools in one platform. We wanted to have all data in one place, and have it normalized to do more intelligent detections and correlate them. XDR came into existence with an architecture that mapped to what we were doing, so we grafted onto that, as part of open XDR. The open element is a key part of our connection with Barracuda.”

Fleming Shi, CTO at Barracuda Networks, also emphasized the centrality of Stellar Cyber’s Open XDR platform to the expanded relationship.

“This announcement is squarely focused on open XDR platforms,” he said. “They are staying very open in terms of benefit to all vendors, and they have been proven to ingest data effectively. Having this integration with Stellar Cyber provides a single pane of glass for all products integrated with them.”

Jespersen stated that while there are other Open XDR alliances in the market, not all of them are created equal.

“There is a lot of noise on XDR, and four or five different alliances have popped up,” he said. “We see them as groups of vendors who are integrating rather than taking a truly open approach. We are holding the line on open is better, because since we are a SOC platform, openness gives us broad visibility across different tools and lets us automate back to those devices.”

Jespersen said that the alliance with Barracuda will significantly expand their Go-to-Market.

“We have a unique opportunity with Barracuda,” he noted. “We are a 100% channel-oriented company, but one involves sales to end users and the other one is to MSSPs. Many top MSSPs are on our platform. The great thing about being open is that we can provide visibility across all the tools the customer already has, which is very cool from a channel perspective. They can sell us, or provide us as a managed service.”

Shi indicated that this integration will be of more interest to their MSSP partners than their MSP ones.

“It will excite our MSSP partners because they are sophisticated organizations where they integrate tools including platforms like Stellar,” he said. “This tool is very powerful, so the MSSPs will likely get the great benefit out of this integration. We do offer managed SOC as-a-service through MSP partner with our SKOUT service.”

While a detailed roadmap on what Barracuda solutions will be integrated with Stellar Cyber going forward is not yet public, Shi provided some general guidelines.

“We have more to do beyond the solutions we have already identified,” he said. “We are planning to add more signals and telemetry from other products we have, and from across the entire portfolio, like data protection.”

Shi also indicated there would likely be additional strategic integrations with other strategic partners – providing that they are open.

“In the future I think there will likely be some type of consortium or alliance,” he said. “I do see other SIEM and SOAR companies moving in his direction, and as long as they are open, they would be targets that make sense.”