The two bundles, which make the customer’s path to purchase much simpler and faster, will also benefit Barracuda channel partners by making their lives easier.
Today, cybersecurity vendor Barracuda is announcing two new Application Protection plans that make it easy for customers to protect websites, applications, and APIs, and make it the whole purchasing process much simpler than it was before. A key difference between the Advanced and Premium plans is that the more comprehensive Premium plan applies more advanced machine learning protection.
Barracuda had an offering with a similar name before, but the new ones are significantly different.
“Previously we had Cloud Application Protection, but it was more of a marketing term for our products,” said Nitzan Miron, Vice President of Product Management, Application Security, at Barracuda. “However, it wasn’t reflected in how customers or partners would buy. The difference now is that it is reflected in how it’s sold. We changed it from a marketing term, to how it is actually bought.”
Miron stressed that it is also easier to buy with these Application Protection plans.
“We had a really easy message, but when you went to buy it was more complicated,” he said. “Now the buying message is as easy as the marketing. One of the things we did to achieve this was just take the bandwidth out. We don’t charge based on bandwidth any more. Before we also tended to turn things into a feature discussion. We have now simplified it down.”
Miron said that there are basically two questions.
“First, how many applications do you need,” he said. “Second, do you want our Advanced or Premium Package?” The more basic Advanced Package protects against Web and API Attacks, gives full spectrum protection against volumetric and application DDoS attacks, protects against zero-day attacks, and stops account takeover attacks against your web and API applications. It also has a ML-powered Auto Configuration Engine to make administration much easier.
The Premium plan contains everything in the Advanced plan, plus automated API Discovery to secure hidden shadow APIs, machine-learning–powered Bot Protection to identify and block emerging complex threats in near-real time, as well as machine learning-powered Privileged Account protection, client-side protection to identify and block website supply chain attacks, container protection and built-in Zero Trust Access capabilities.
“A big difference between the two plans is the dynamic machine learning-based capabilities,” Miron said. “Advanced gives you more static rules, With the Premium Plan, the system learns your traffic and configures the rules for you to an extent.”
Nitzan Miron, Vice President of Product Management, Application Security, at Barracuda
Miron emphasized that the fact there are only two plans shows their commitment to simplicity.
“We were originally planning on three, but we did a lot of market research with over 600 customers, and they told us that a lot of differentiation features they thought should be in all of the plans. We went down to two plans based on that data.”
The differentiation that makes a customer a better fit for Premium is largely dependent on risk.
“Premium is for higher risk customers in areas like banking, patient health information, and government,” Miron said. “They tend to be areas where the penalties for having a breach are higher.”
The two new plans are not new products, but are essentially a repackaging, but they will subsume existing SaaS products into the two bundles.
“It’s not a new product, but it was a much simpler way to buy,” he said. “An existing offering like WaaF as-a-service which are not part of the bundles will go to market that way going forward . So Waaf would be be replaced from a selling motion perspective and now just be part of the bundles.”
This only applies to the SaaS offerings. The WaaF appliances will continue to be sold separately.
“For the SaaS solution, which is growing very strongly, the two bundles will be the only way to buy these products now.”
While the new application protection plans make things much simpler for the customer, Miron said that the partners will be major beneficiaries from the changes.
“This was primarily done to make it easier for the partners,” he said. “Customers receive these through our partners. The new plans make it all easier to explain and quite a bit more straightforward. That makes the partner’s job easier and making the partner’s job easier is how we sell.”
The new application protection plans will be available to customers and partners on April 24, 2023.
