The new announcements include an integration between Barracuda CloudGen Firewall and Barracuda XDR, and the addition of Zero Trust Access to the Barracuda Email Protection Suite.

Today, Barracuda kicked off their Secured.22 Customer Conference, their annual global virtual conference which lasts today and tomorrow. While the focus is on technical security scenarios that enable practitioners to identify, prevent, recover, and respond quickly to cyber security attacks, the company also made some product announcements. These includes Barracuda introducing an integration between Barracuda CloudGen Firewall and Barracuda XDR, and the addition of Zero Trust Access to its email protection suite.

“Our general theme for the week here is a focus on Barracuda’s customers,” said Brian Babineau, Chief Customer Officer at Barracuda. “That conference is built upon security practitioner scenarios that we believe our customers should be aware of, and how to best address them.”

Babineau cited as an example how bots are taking what used to be a process tied to a shopping cart process and now attacking it within 20 seconds, citing the need for customers to know the changes in how bots are automating, because they are very targeted.

“As Chief Customer Office, my conversations with clients are focused on talks about how to get information back, and that’s really the whole paradigm of conference,” Babineau said. “We have the best security solutions in the marketplace. Everyone will be do the prevention, but only a very small subset willl take it all the way through and get your data back.”

The new announcements included Barracuda expanding their XDR capabilities to strengthen their security offering to MSPs through an integration with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

“This is more that just connecting them together,” Babineau said. “It’s about driving more efficiencies in alerts. its understanding what’s in an alarm but going beyond a check the box integration to determine what it can best do from a SOC standpoint, and get better response times. Because XDR increases the amount of alarms that go off, we need to triage and response automatically.”

Beyond the XDR and firewall integration itself, this also now maps detection rules with MITRE ATT&CK(R) framework to quickly address detection gaps.

“It’s the type of integration and what it allows to do with our firewalls, Babineau said. “Those alerts can be overbearing for some. Our integration tells which alerts are worth investigating and which are just worth keeping an eye on.”

Barracuda is also adding Zero Trust Access to their Email Protection suite. Barracuda Email Protection Premium Plus, now with Zero Trust Access included, hardens the Microsoft 365 environment by continuously verifying and only allowing the right users to access specified resources.

“With this we are really emphasizing simplicity,” Babineau said. “That’s a logical place to start. You don’t need a series of 10 to 12 products and have multiple configurations. It’s important to have contractor access at the right place at the  right time  and to keep it all simple. W also treat everything as an object, where users have to be proven, and we will prevent access where necessary if there is too much risk.”

Babineau also emphasized the second part of this announcement.

“The second part is tuning the offering for Microsoft 365 environments to make sure you are who you say you are,” he said. “We have made the solution available as part of a bundle offering.”

Barracuda also reported that through cloud-first innovations , they grew their Data Protection new business sales by 30% year-over-year at the end of Q2FY23. Barracuda Data Protection solutions also posted 75% year-over-year sales growth in international markets at the end of Q2FY23.

“We posted very good momentum on the data protection side, which is a critical step in the security process,” Babineau said.