Video: 10 Minute IT Jams - Who is Barracuda?

Cyber security threats are on the rise. For businesses across Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, the fight to keep data safe has never been more crucial. Barracuda, a leading global cyber security and data protection company, is determined to make the digital world safer for everyone.

Andrew Huntley, Barracuda's Regional Director for Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands, explained the company's approach during a recent interview. "We're a cyber security and data protection technology company," he said. "One of the things that we really do strive at Barracuda is to make the world a safer place. We believe every business deserves access to cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use."

With customers worldwide, Barracuda focuses on four core technology areas: email protection, application and cloud security, network security, and data protection. "We protect email, networks, data and applications with innovative solutions that grow and adapt with our customers' journey," Huntley explained.

Breaking down these offerings, Huntley said the first is 'total email protection', which provides comprehensive defence across virtually all types of email threat. "This offering gives you the best possible protection from virtually all types of email threat types," he said.

The second area is application and cloud security, where Barracuda's cloud application protection platform shields business apps via a unified interface. "On this platform we have WAFs that can be physical, virtual or cloud-based, plus a SaaS offering which is our WAF-as-a-service offering as well," Huntley said, referring to the company's web application firewalls.

Third is network security, through Barracuda's next-generation, or 'cloud-gen', firewalls which secure users and sites either in the cloud or on-premises. Finally, data protection is critical, Huntley said, given the prevalence of ransomware and data loss incidents. "We can protect people's hybrid environments, their physical environments, their virtual, and also their SaaS environment," he said.

Barracuda keeps these offerings under constant development. "We just released our latest version of our Barracuda cloud-to-cloud backup product - it's our version 3," Huntley shared. "CCB version 3 was completely re-architected and delivers a fast search and restore experience for Microsoft 365 data, including Teams, Exchange Online, SharePoint and OneDrive."

The updated product is built on a modern, cloud-native platform, designed to extend to new data sources and integrate security services such as advanced threat protection, data classification and data loss prevention. "We find this extremely relevant today with the explosion of data on Microsoft 365," Huntley said, noting this growth has been "largely driven by the increase of remote working".

Indeed, the pandemic has fundamentally changed workplace practices and data protection challenges. Barracuda's own research shows this well. "There's a really interesting report that we've brought out on the shift to remote work and how that's intensified the data protection challenges," Huntley revealed. The report, focused on Australian IT decision-makers, highlights three key findings.

Firstly, according to Huntley, "46 per cent of Australian IT decision makers say their organisation has experienced a ransomware attack. That's a fairly high number when you consider it." Secondly, 70 per cent of Australian organisations are still relying only on Microsoft 365's built-in capabilities to back up and recover their data. Huntley believes this reliance exposes businesses to risk. "That's an interesting discussion when we find out that people are still relying on Microsoft 365 to do that," he said.

Thirdly, the report finds that 91 per cent of Australian respondents are using Microsoft Teams more intensively, raising concerns about data retention. "People are using Teams and this creates an increased data retention concern as people start to use Teams on a more complete basis," Huntley added.

To meet these mounting challenges, Barracuda has invested heavily in its presence and infrastructure in the ANZ region. "We have a well-established channel. Barracuda was founded back in 2003 and we signed up our first partner in Australia back in 2004. That partner's still a partner today, so they've been with us on this journey for 17, going on 18, years," Huntley said.

Barracuda's 100 per cent channel-led business model relies on partnerships with two major local distributors in Australia and New Zealand, as well as a growing network of certified channel partners. These partners go through rigorous certification and training to prove their capability to support customers.

"Our channel network is broken up into premier, preferred and authorised partners, and people achieve that status by basically going through certification level, doing the technical training, proving their capabilities so they can help our customers out with it," Huntley explained. "That's part of what we do from a local perspective."

Equally important is Barracuda's local cloud infrastructure. Huntley said, "We also have a local Australian presence for our cloud services, including backup, email archiving, email security and application security." He emphasised that these services operate from data centres located in Australia, ensuring data sovereignty and local support.

When asked how businesses or potential partners could engage with Barracuda, Huntley stressed the value of personal contact with his local team, as well as with certified distributors. "If they're a reseller and they want to start that journey of being a Barracuda partner, they can contact one of the local team or contact one of the local distributors - whichever way that they choose is most convenient. We'll do our best to help them out," he said.

As the cyber threat landscape continues to evolve rapidly, Huntley underscored Barracuda's commitment not just to innovation, but to partnership. "We're an easy company to do with and we're here for the long haul," he said.