The five previous offerings have been reduced to three, and workflows and data classification have been improved.
Today, cybersecurity vendor Barracuda is announcing enhancements to both the technology and product portfolio of their Barracuda Email Protection offering. The technology improvements include more fine-grained automated workflows, the integration of the recently launched Barracuda Data Inspector data classification solution into Email Protection, the public launch of SIEM/SOAR/XDR integrations with Email Protection and the availability of gateway AI technology in all the portfolio’s solutions, whereas before it was limited to the higher-end ones. That portfolio has also been consolidated from five offerings to three, to make it simpler for customers.
“This release is all about the simplicity of the new options we are giving to our partners and customers,” said Mike Flouton, VP of Email Protection at Barracuda. “Sometimes when we launch something, we position it as an add on-to existing packages. This was an opportunity to take some of that new technology and fold it into three options that are easy.”
These three options are down from the five that existed previously.
“Before there were five bundled options,” Flouton said. “Essentials had three tiers, and there were two on top of that – essentially two different families. Consolidating into three makes things easier and simpler.”
Now, there are three options for SaaS plans: Advanced, Premium and Premium Plus.
Advanced provides email gateway defense, impersonation and phishing protection, and automated remediation.
Premium provides all the above, plus incident response, domain fraud protection, and DNS filtering.
Premium Plus includes everything in Premium plus data protection, archiving, and user security awareness training.
“We think that the market for all three versions will be similar,” Flouton indicated. “All three are a good fit for our entire customer base. The last two will appeal more to larger customers, particularly those with more stringent data protection requirements.”
Flouton said the simplified solution set will be a major plus for partners as well.
“This is all about ease of purchase and use for customers, which is great for partners,” he said. “The solutions are now better aligned to partners’ customer base and how they want to buy. This should simplify the sales process. So should simplified naming, through which products like Barracuda Sentinel are having their name changed to show their function, and to get back to the basics around the problem that we are solving.”
Several product enhancements to Email Protection are also being announced. One is the expansion of automated workflows.
“Organizations now have a lot finer control over how the system will remediate messages,” Flouton indicated. “Before there were workflows but they were simpler ones. Now you have more fine-grained control. For instance, if five users report a site as malicious, I can set it to trust those and automatically remove it without the necessity of human investigation.” The enhanced custom workflows provide the ability to completely automate incident response.
Barracuda is also announcing SIEM, SOAR and XDR API integrations into the Email Protection product.
“We hadn’t really marketed these publicly before, so this is the public launch,” Flouton said. “There are also more granular options in terms of integrating with those platforms.”
Barracuda Data Inspector, which was launched earlier this year, and which provides data classification capabilities to help find sensitive data such as Personal Identifiable Information and malware, has been integrated into Email Protection.
“We launched Data Inspector as a standalone product earlier this year, and are now making it available as part of our Email Protection plans,” Flouton noted. “We don’t think this will gut the market for the standalone. Some organizations may use a different family of email protection products, or may want Protector for a different department in an organization. We view them as two distinct answers.”
Email Protection now combines both gateway and API-based AI technology to detect and remediate threats in real time.
“Previously, this was only available with a gateway in the upper two of the old five tiers,” Flouton said. “Now both gateway and API approach are available in all three.
