Tag: barracuda

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall – A Walk in the Clouds

By Andrew Harmon

Posted On August 21, 2020

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall – A Walk in the Clouds

barracuda cloudgen f-series firewall brands firewalls

What is a Barracuda CloudGen Firewall?

Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls offer physical, virtual, and cloud-based options to secure networks wherever users are. That means they protect today’s cloud-connected users and their networks beyond the traditional perimeter.

So that’s the simple answer. But what makes CloudGen appliances stand out from the next generation firewall crowd? How about we go over what these firewalls have to offer when it comes to securing networks large and small.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Specs

Focusing on the physical, F-series firewalls come sized for just about any business need. Even the smallest of these, the F12, supports a substantial number of concurrent sessions. Starting at 80,000 for that model, the concurrent session count grows into the millions as you reach high-end devices.

Another important thing to note: F-series firewalls feature the same comprehensive security features you’ll count on to stay protected no matter the model. What features you may ask? Here are just a few:

Intrusion Prevention Systems (IPS)
Application control
Dynamic routing
Application-based provider selection
SSL interception to read encrypted traffic
SD-WAN for simple, affordable, secure branch connectivity
Web filtering
Client-to-site and site-to-site VPN to connect your remote workforce

On top of all that, if you’re worried about your firewall supporting resource-intensive tasks, don’t fret. Tasks like sandboxing and more are offloaded seamlessly to the cloud. And with all of these features, getting your protection up and running is a snap too, with zero-touch deployment. We should mention too, that cloud-based and virtual models generally come standard with these very same features.

Barracuda Firewall Models

The Barracuda CloudGen family includes F-series hardware, VF-series virtual, and AWS, Azure, & Google cloud-based firewalls. Options span user counts of 5 to several thousand to protect networks of any size, anywhere. For example, the F-Series starts with the F12 and tops out at the F1000. On top of that, virtual varieties go from VF10 (for 10 IPs) to VF8000 (for an unlimited number). Finally, when navigating cloud-based firewalls, you start at Level 2 and work up to Level 8. And even more finally, choose the PAYG cloud firewall for a time-based, pay as you go model.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Price

Barracuda CloudGen firewalls offer a wide variety of security and networking features for competitive prices. For instance, the small business or branch office F12 retails for about $750. As we often say, you’ll want more than just the firewall to optimize your security. In addition to the many above-noted included features, Barracuda offers security services subscriptions on a monthly basis.

These feature options like advanced threat protection, advanced remote access, malware protection and more. In addition to the competitive prices of these services, their monthly nature gives you greater flexibility to make changes based on your evolving needs. All in all, Barracuda CloudGen firewalls have a lot to offer in today’s perimeter-less network environment.

What is Barracuda Essentials? Email security for SMBs

By Andrew Harmon

Posted On July 30, 2020

barracuda barracuda essentials email security

What is Barracuda Essentials?

Barracuda Essentials is an email security solution ideal for small businesses and mid-sized organizations looking to deploy simple, yet feature-rich inbox security. Barracuda Essentials includes a ton of anti-virus, anti-spam, and advanced threat protection elements that prevent email-based attacks. That includes protection against phishing and other social engineering attacks. Oh and by the way, email is the most common vector of attack against SMBs. In fact…

Did you know… 91% of cyberattacks start with an email

Barracuda Essentials provides cloud-based, advanced protection as well as encryption and data leakage protection. What’s more, no additional hardware or software is necessary to add cloud-to-cloud message archiving. With all these powerful features combined, you have no reason to fear ransomware.

Email Continuity of up to 96 hours means your small business can keep sending and receiving business-critical messages even if you experience email outages or loss of Internet. How does it work? Emails fail over to a cloud-based service, letting you use emergency mailboxes so there’s no interruption.

What sets Barracuda email security apart?

Stops targeted phishing attacks with URL protection
Dynamic threat analysis & real-time threat detection
Integrates directly with Office 365 API
Centralized management with cloud-based console
Cloud-based archiving simplifies compliance

Barracuda Essentials Email Security

Barracuda Essentials locks down small business emails, cutting off the #1 attack vector for modern threats. Most importantly, all these services are cloud-based, meaning there’s no need to download additional software or find space in your server rack for another appliance. This cloud-based protection includes:

Anti-Spam
Inbound & outbound anti-virus
Phishing protection
DDoS protection
Advanced anti-malware
Full-system emulation sandboxing
URL protection to foil typosquatting

Quickly filter your entire volume of inbound email traffic to detect & block email threats. Barracuda Essentials protects inbound traffic with advanced features like spam scoring, intent analysis, and reputation checks. Barracuda Essentials is backed by 24×7 threat intelligence from Barracuda Central. To sum up, this global operation center constantly monitors new threats and empowers onboard AI to automatically detect and respond to incidents—even zero day threats.

Easily meet compliance & maintain productivity

Barracuda Essentials includes cloud archiving that is easily searchable, tamper-proof, and redundant. Above all, this simplifies compliance with easy e-discovery, allowing you to search and filter historical message archives to easily locate specific emails.

Ransomware is a huge concern for small businesses. Loss of important data can be devastating whatever the cause, but cloud-to-cloud backup eliminates the threat entirely. Barracuda Essentials cloud-to-cloud backup lets you easily restore your data in the event of a loss. In sum, this minimizes downtime, letting your business get back to what it does best. Cloud-to-cloud backup includes unlimited storage, so Barracuda Essentials is an ideal solution to grow with your business.

Easily meet compliance demands
Reduce ongoing legal risks
Automatic de-duplication minimizes storage footprint, saving you money

Productivity is a huge concern for small businesses. If inbound and outbound email stops flowing, the lifeblood of small business stops too. With email spooling, you do not have to fear email downtime. Up to 96 hours of email spooling keeps you rolling even in the face of major outages.

Block spearphishing attacks with Barracuda Sentinel

Barracuda Essentials teams up with Barracuda Sentinel when you buy the cost-efficient Total Email Protection bundle. Sentinel defends users on your network from the latest social engineering attacks by utilizing artificial intelligence. And it’s very intelligent. To clarify, Barracuda literally learns the way you write emails to other users in your organization to determine if an account has been taken over or impersonated. This granular user awareness is unprecedented in its ability to predict potential account takeover.

Take a deeper dive into Barracuda Email Security

What Is Barracuda Email Security

By Andrew Harmon

Posted On July 9, 2020

barracuda barracuda essentials barracuda sentinel email security phishline total email security

Barracuda email security is more than just one product – it’s a philosophy. If you’ve spent any time following cyber threats, you know that email is a favorite point of entry for hackers. And while training your workforce to spot email threats is a must, humans are in fact human. That means you need a comprehensive plan to keep your network safe. In fact, comprehensive is a great word to describe Barracuda email security. It encompasses a variety of solutions with options for any business need. So let’s dive into some of the components of Barracuda’s email security lineup.

What is Barracuda email security used for

Use Barracuda email security to protect your network from all manner of email-borne threats with multi-layered protection. Those layers include:

Defense at the gateway
Email resiliency
Protection from fraud
Email privacy
Greater user security awareness

In sum, deploying the right Barracuda solutions gives you peace of mind that hazards like spam, phishing messages, viruses, and more won’t bring down your network.

How does Barracuda email encryption work

Barracuda email encryption comes through two possible methods: the Email Security Gateway appliance or the cloud-based Barracuda Email Security Service. Both offer secure, outbound email encryption, with multiple policies available that give admins granular control over exactly which outbound emails to encrypt. Once administrators decide on specific policies, users can send emails – and any attachments – that match policy to the Barracuda Message Center with secure TLS encryption.

Backing up a bit, email encryption ensures that only the intended recipient can access an email and its attachments. Traditionally, that access for recipients is tricky, as they’ll need an encryption key. In this case, the web-based Barracuda Message Center handles everything. First, the recipient receives an email notifying them that they have an encrypted message with a link to the message center. Next, the user must choose a password upon first accessing the center. Then, they can view their encrypted messages, download attachments, and reply – all through the Barracuda Message Center. And the best part, once users choose a password, they can use it anytime they need to access subsequent encrypted messages.

What is Barracuda spam filter

Barracuda spam filter stops spam emails that often make it through other email filters. It does so without blocking important messages, thanks to one of the industry’s lowest false-positive rates. Just like Barracuda email security as a whole, spam filtering is a multi-pronged effort. The award-winning spam filtering technology finds email from known spammers, analyzes any embedded URLs to find malicious links, and even catches spammers’ attempts to evade filters by placing embedded text within images.

You may be thinking, won’t these processes slow down email delivery? Barracuda thought of that too, and the answer is no. These spam detection processes take place in the Barracuda cloud, so they don’t slow you down. Spam emails are pre-filtered before they reach your server. That means you also get protection from denial-of-service (DOS) attacks that spammers may launch your way.

How do you use Barracuda spam filter

You get the award-winning Barracuda spam filter through Barracuda Essentials, an all-in-one, cloud-based email protection platform. Barracuda Essentials combines spam filtering with Advanced Threat Protection, which filters more hazards including email-based malware and even zero-day threats – as we know that spam filtering is just one part of the email protection puzzle.

And Barracuda Essentials doesn’t stop at inbound email filtering. In essence, it’s a way to get your business – regardless of size – into Barracuda email security as a whole. This combines inbound filtering with:

Outbound email filtering
Archiving
Email retention enforcement
Full backup and recovery of every email/file

In other words, it not only protects your network from incoming email threats, it also safeguards against data loss with data leak protection policies and the aforementioned encryption. And it’s got your back with full cloud backup and recovery of every email and file.

How much does Barracuda email security cost

How much Barracuda email security costs depends on which solutions you deploy and the needs of your business. If you’re a business with about 50 employees for example looking for the comprehensive protection of Barracuda Essentials, you can get it for under $150 a month.

Barracuda Essentials is available for deployments as small as 10 users or as large as 10,000-plus, with prices per user going down the larger the company. Get started with Barracuda email security today!

Barracuda Backup Review: Info, Specs, & Pricing

By Andrew Harmon

Posted On July 8, 2020

Barracuda Backup Review: Info, Specs, & Pricing

barracuda barracuda backup data storage

What is Barracuda Backup?

Barracuda Backup protects you against data loss no matter what. Available as both hardware appliances and cloud-based virtual machines, Barracuda Backups deliver constant data protection while replicating it in off-site archives.

That means ransomware has met its match. Files get encrypted? You’ve got backups! Disaster wipe out your whole office? You have copies in the cloud. In sum, Barracuda provides rapid recovery from data loss incidents, letting your business get back up and running fast.

You have a number of options available to help you quickly recover:

LiveBoot
Cloud LiveBoot
Physical-to-Virtal (P2V)
LiveBrowse

What does a Barracuda Backup Do?

Barracuda Backup appliances run constantly in the background of your network, taking full backups of data and company resources hosted there. Inline replication sends backups of your data to an off-site storage server where the data is housed until needed.

If you experience an event that results in data loss, you’ll have multiple options to quickly and easily get that data back. You can vault historical data revisions to the cloud for up to 7 years! Need longer-term than that? Barracuda Backup also supports archiving in AWS Simple Storage Services and Glacier.

As mentioned, deployment is flexible with physical and virtual appliance options. Compatible host-level virtual environments include:

VMWare vSphere
Microsoft Hyper-V

Does the backup take a lot of time/money?

Thanks to inline deduplication, which comes standard on all Barracuda Backup products, organizations can greatly reduce bandwidth requirements and write time. Deduplication makes data transfers faster by reducing the total number of bytes that must be sent.

Barracuda deduplicates data as it is received so duplicate copies of repeated data are eliminated. This results in an overall small storage footprint. And a small storage footprint translates directly into less cost for you.

How much does Barracuda Backup cost?

Barracuda Backup pricing is very forgiving for small businesses. The Barracuda Backup Server 390 costs just a smidge over $3000 and has available usable storage of up to 4 Terabytes. That works out to roughly 75 cents per Megabyte of data. Plus, this cost-per-megabyte ratio gets even cheaper on larger units. That’s data protected, data archived, and data safe from the threat of ransomware.

Frequently Asked Questions:

Why do I need a data Barracuda Backup solution?

There are several threats out there that can lead to massive data loss. Ransomware has exploded in popularity, hurricane season is here (or always lurking), and sometimes malicious or neglectful employees just delete stuff. Having multiple, redundant copies of your business’s most important resources is crucial. Like car insurance, you won’t really appreciate or notice it until you need it!

Why not just use an external hard drive?

Data loss can happen at any time: even 10 minutes before your next scheduled manual backup to an HDD. Plus, that hard drive represents just one more copy of your important data. Barracuda Backups are automated, scheduled around the clock, and keep multiple historical revisions that you can fall back on at any time. An integrated offsite backup solution leaves no cracks for your data to fall through.

Why Barracuda Backups over similar solutions?

Barracuda Backups create both a local copy of protected data as well as multiple offsite copies that are all monitored and managed by Barracuda Central as part of a monthly backup subscription. This makes managing your backups easy.

Will Barracuda Backup help me meet compliance regulations?

Yes. Barracuda Backup is ideal for meeting compliance requirements like HIPAA.

Where is my data stored?

Barracuda combines on-site appliance storage of your backups with off-site backups at a secure, remote location. On-site storage means you can restore your data super-fast for small local incidents while off-site storage is ideal in cases where your network is heavily compromised or struck by disaster.

How much data can be stored on the appliance?

On-board storage for these appliances starts on the low end with a usable storage capacity of 1 Terabyte for the Barracuda Backup Appliance 190. The largest appliance caps out at 112 Terabytes on the Barracuda Backup 1090. No matter how much data you’ve got to store, Barracuda leaves plenty of room.