Barracuda Networks, a company providing cybersecurity and data protection solutions based on cloud services and network appliances, recently announced an updated and expanded public cloud functionality for the Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Barracuda NextGen Firewall. The updated cloud-generation firewalls will provide customers with a straightforward migration path to public cloud, enabling utility-based consumption and automated security controls for DevSecOps workflows.
Barracuda Networks provides cybersecurity services to over 150,000 organizations worldwide delivered in appliance, virtual appliance, cloud and hybrid deployment configurations.
Barracuda sponsored a survey earlier this year, which showed that over 40 percent of the respondent businesses were running a portion of their infrastructure in the public cloud. Respondents were asked to cite important reasons for their cloud adoption with the leading drivers being:
- easy integration with legacy technology (61%)
- strong protection of applications (54%)
- strong protection of access to applications in the public cloud (48%)
The same enterprises reported facing an increasingly sophisticated threat landscape with 50 percent stating that they have been hit with a cyberattack of some nature.
The intention behind the Barracuda cloud-generation firewalls is to provide its customers with flexibility to cost-effectively deploy security at critical stages—in the cloud, in multi-cloud or hybrid environments, and across the development lifecycle.
“Perimeter-based firewalls create tightly-coupled environments that scale vertically, which makes perfect sense on-premises but is entirely the wrong model for the public cloud. This is really about using the right tool for the job,” said Tim Jefferson, VP public cloud, Barracuda, of the update. “Customers should look to automate the orchestration, deployment and configuration of security architectures that are loosely coupled and scale elastically. In today’s hybrid environments, customers need consistent security across on-premises and cloud-based environments—Barracuda cloud-generation firewalls help address this requirement.”
New capabilities of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall and Barracuda NextGen Firewall include:
- Strongly architected for the public cloud – Integrate with public cloud fabric, create API integrations for automation workflows and DevOps tools, and manage across hybrid environments centrally. This provides customers with benefits of the cloud, yet doesn’t compromise their security posture.
- Support for cloud-specific use cases – Support unique requirements of the cloud including distributed policy sets, fully meshed connectivity, horizontal scalability, and north-south traffic management. This allows customers to take advantage of the benefits of cloud automation around autoscaling, deployment, high-availability, networking and monitoring.
- Match Customer’s Cloud Consumption Models – Customers can deploy security in alignment with their current public cloud consumption model.
- DevSecOps with Puppet – The REST API framework can be utilized to automate the configuration of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, which includes Puppet integration within AWS now, making it more straightforward for customers to integrate security controls into their cloud native applications on AWS.
This integration enables operations teams and cloud security groups to codify their firewall policies so that they can be tested and secured within the overall application delivery process. Puppet maintains the desired state of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall, remediates unauthorized changes automatically, and creates methods for security teams to rapidly spot and fix known vulnerabilities, helping further application velocity, security and reliability.
- Usage-based billing using the AWS Marketplace Metering Service Billing – Barracuda NextGen Firewall has been made available in the AWS Marketplace as a metered billing service, joining the Barracuda Web Application Firewall there, thus removing any licensing friction and providing a pricing structure determined by actual traffic secured. Customers can build CI/CD pipelines that integrate their ISV partner solutions, and charges are based on the bandwidth consumed across deployed firewalls and standard Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) charges per instance.
Current businesses using the update provided their own testimonials:
Of the update, Samm DiStasio, vice president, business development, Puppet, said, “Real-time, proactive security throughout the development process is critical for tighter application security in today’s threat environment. Barracuda is our first security partner in public cloud to help us bridge the security gap in DevOps. Our integration with Barracuda Web Application Firewall helps speed application delivery by automating management of critical security policies.”
Max Longin, Founding Partner, Club Automation, stated, “We are using Barracuda firewalls provisioned through the AWS Marketplace to effectively guard our applications against web-based attacks and application-layer attacks. The Barracuda solution plugs s into our AWS environment, and is doing its job of minimizing the attack surface area and helping our customers keep club member cardholder data protected.”
Barracuda will demonstrate its cloud-generation firewalls in booth # 1533 during AWS re:Invent, Nov. 27-Dec. 1, in Las Vegas.
