More than 200,000 organizations worldwide trust Barracuda to protect them — in ways they may not even know they are at risk — so they can focus on taking their business to the next level. Barracuda strive to make the world a safer place. Barracuda believe every business deserves access to cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use. The company protect email, networks, data, and applications with innovative solutions that grow and adapt to our customers’ journey. In an interaction with Manoj Jha, Editor, Smart State India, Mr. Murali Urs, Country Manager India, Barracuda Networks, explain the challenges in driving digital transformation and future plans of the company.
What will be the focus areas for the Barracuda in 2021?
The pandemic has completely changed the threat perception last year, forcing rapid adoption of SaaS solutions and collaborative tools among organisations for their remote workers and off-site IT support. Companies are quickly switching to the adoption of Office 365 and Microsoft Teams. The continued shift to the public cloud creates a significant customer need with the as-a-service approach they want. At Barracuda, we have increased our focus on cloud solutions and continue to deliver innovative security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use. To protect and support our customers in dealing with a new reality, Barracuda recently introduced the latest version of Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, a fast and resilient SaaS solution to secure and backup Microsoft Office 365 data. Barracuda is also providing distributed businesses a new way to modernize remote access with Barracuda CloudGen Access, a Zero Trust solution enables secure, reliable and fast access to cloud or on-premises applications and workloads from any device and location. Together with the new Barracuda CloudGen WAN, the first global secure SD-WAN service built natively on Microsoft Azure, organisations can benefit from optimized network performance, security and minimized cost as they speed up public cloud adoption such as Microsoft Office 365 during the pandemic lockdown.
Meanwhile, cyber mafias are turning into opportunists, bringing a lot of innovations in the existing attacks. They have drastically intensified their attack vectors by taking advantage of the widespread discussion of COVID-19 in emails and across the web. This year, we foresee the threat landscape becoming more challenging and COVID-19 will continue to impact the security of every industry in many ways. Barracuda focuses to provide a broad and growing portfolio of cloud-enabled security solutions across email, cloud, network and application to address the rising security concerns around public cloud and network security, and advanced email threats.
Right now, which are the primary focus verticals for the Barracuda?
Cybercrime will go where money can be made. Any business that has customers, employees, and transactions is a target, so every industry needs to make sure it is prepared to deal with security issues. Attackers can target any endpoint that is less protected in the presence of distracted remote employees and continue to exploit human errors via email, public cloud and web applications. We focus on helping our partners and customers secure that journey from on-premises, physical environments to the public cloud by providing the solutions and support required.
What type of challenges you face in driving digital transformation?
A security breach could derail vital digital transformation and result in major reputational and financial damage at a time when most companies can least afford it. Looking at the current explosion in potentially unsecured remote working endpoints and connections, and the expansion of the corporate attack surface brought about by cloud adoption and the use of web apps, we are observing a rise in security threats and associated concerns. According to our recent report, 66 % of respondents said they’d already experienced a major security scare since the remote working transition, and employees from 67% of Indian organisations had observed an increase in phishing attacks after shifting to remote working. The pandemic has given an opportunity to the scammers to craft enticing phishing emails. The result for the organization could be email account takeover, data theft, or even crippling ransomware-related service outages.
It has been argued that remote employees are more distracted and therefore susceptible to phishing attacks. A lack of protection on home devices and networks and vulnerabilities in key web applications leave them more exposed. In our research report, we identified that nearly 61% of respondents feel their remote workforce isn’t properly trained in cybersecurity and 54% are not confident in the security of their web applications, another major target for malicious third parties seeking to access corporate data or to disrupt organizations with DDoS attacks.
What is more concerning is the fact that 71% of Indian organisations admitted that security has taken a back seat since the shift to remote working while 53% claimed they don’t have an up-to-date strategy or solutions to protect against all remote working threats. These are serious challenges, which makes it vital for organisations to give threat protection the attention it deserves
How Cloud Computing is changing the face of Cyber Security?
In the last few years including the pandemic-hit 2020, we have witnessed the cloud revolutionising tech-based businesses. However, one of the biggest issues revolving around the cloud has always been, cybersecurity. The cloud is followed by a host of cybersecurity issues like lack of transparency between businesses and the third parties, vulnerable APIs, cloud services leaving a network connected to the global Internet all the time, etc. while there is no doubt that the internet is increasingly becoming a dangerous place to operate, the rapidly changing technology is bringing another fundamental shift, which is the emergence of cloud computing. Cloud computing enables individuals and organisations to access application services and data from anywhere via a web interface. However, the problems in cyberspace come from a combination of threats and vulnerabilities.
As more and more capabilities are now delivered as cloud services, it is critical for organizations to implement cloud security posture management and understand whether and how the assets and services delivered in public cloud are adhering to compliance regimes. In addition, as more and more companies are exposed to threats that impact the privacy of their customers or enterprises, the risk of breaches will require IT security executives to be able to effectively communicate and execute plans that encourage and require other teams to enforce compliance.
While avoiding vulnerabilities might be the ‘holy grail’, adopting a security strategy that focuses on situational awareness can be a significant foundation for understanding threats. Organisations must stay vigilant about the latest attack trends and security exposures and be able to react to these. It is possible to educate employees and develop an effective and sustainable security model by understanding the business and its operational environment. There is a growing need for security executives to get fully comfortable with novel cloud-centric security architecture. IT security executives will need to come up with a more holistic understanding of risk and adequate protection measures as it pertains the entire corporate network, including OT and industrial IoT environments.
What are some of the longer term goals for Barracuda Networks?
From 2003 till today, a lot may have changed since the establishment, but Barracuda Networks continues to focus on its five core values: think customer, drive innovation, take ownership, deliver outcomes, and succeed together. We at Barracuda Networks envision a safer world for businesses everywhere. We are here to protect and support our customers for life, which means providing the best and innovative security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use. We are an innovator in our key markets and continue to deliver innovative security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use. For example, we are the first to offer firewalls and SD-WAN service in Microsoft Azure. Barracuda provides easy, comprehensive and affordable solutions for email protection, application and cloud security, network security and data protection, with more than 200,000 global customers trust Barracuda to safeguard their employees, data, and applications from a wide range of threats. As a company dedicated to partners, we value partnership and work with more than 5,000 channel partners worldwide. We look to grow with channel partners and succeed together, committed to providing customers with world-class products, service and support.
