Defending Against Advanced Threats

Barracuda envisions building a safer world and protecting customers’ email, networks, data, and apps with innovative solutions that are easy to deploy and use

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“Barracuda is a channel dedicated company. We’re committed to helping our partners acquire new business, answer client needs, and prosper together. Partner enablement is a key focus for us.”

Parag Khurana,
Regional Sales Director, Outside Sales,
Barracuda Networks India

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The Pandemic has forced businesses to shift to online operations and there has been a massive adoption of remote working culture and online learning, resulting in digitalisation on an unprecedented scale. Along with the shift to online has also come an unacceptable rise in cybersecurity issues.

With rising ransomware cyberattacks on IT infrastructure, businesses have realized the importance of embracing zero tolerance for gaps in their security strategy. They are increasingly investing on strengthening their cybersecurity to secure their crown jewels and their valuable data. This has thrown open a big opportunity for cybersecurity players.

As the India market remains in the eye of a major digital transformation buoyed by a tech-centred Union Budget,   SME Channels embarks upon recording the voices of the who’s who of the Cybersecurity landscape.

As part of our effort to make the voices of major security players heard by the channel community, here is the Security Predictions from Security major Barracuda Networks.

In a special interaction with SME Channels, Parag Khurana, Regional Sales Director, Outside Sales, Barracuda Networks India, reveals his organization’s strategy to address growing need for security solutions from customers, his predictions for the cybersecurity industry in 2022 and his vision and plans for the channel community. Edited excerpts…

With the pandemic still lurking there, what are the major market trends you are forecasting for 2022? 

There is no reason to believe the threats of today will not be the threats of tomorrow, and attackers will take advantage of current events and make their attacks more effective. We should expect to continue to see a proliferation of distributed denial of service (DDOS) attacks, ransomware, business email compromise, and malware-based attacks.

Consolidation on data-driven platforms is one change to see in 2022 as the market moves to more of a service-driven kind of tooling, including XDR and managed detection and response. Detection and response will get more complex, and it’s a skillset many organisations are missing that needs to be addressed. Many companies, especially SMBs or small-to-medium-sized enterprises, will need some type of managed service to help them in this area to respond efficiently and effectively to survive these cyber-attacks without investing so much in building a team in-house. So, a lot of that market will shift toward managed security service providers.

The rise in online operations and massive business migrations to the cloud during the pandemic has created humongous security issues, how are you bracing to address the security challenges faced by businesses?

Businesses have indeed accelerated digital transformation and cloud adoption amid the pandemic, which has provided increased attack surfaces for attacks with the disappearance of traditional corporate perimeter. At Barracuda, we envision to build a safer world and protect our customers’ email, networks, data, and applications by offering innovative security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy, and use.

With securing remote access and corporate data become more important in distributed workforce during the pandemic, we introduced Barracuda CloudGen Access, a zero-trust solution to protect apps and give scattered enterprises a new way to enforce access controls without compromising productivity. And as we see the growing demand from customers to protect their data locally, we also rearchitected Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup and added a new regional data center in India to help customers meet data protection requirements by providing quick and reliable backup for their Microsoft 365 data.

In additional, our security solutions offer a multi-layered protection for distributed enterprises. For email security, Barracuda Email Protection plans provide comprehensive solutions combining gateway, API-based AI technology and security awareness training to detect and remediate evolving email threats. For application security, we have Barracuda Cloud Application Protection, a platform leveraging machine learning and containerized WAF that protects apps and blocks supply chain attacks, bad bots and more OWASP Top 10 Web & API threats. For network security, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall ensures distributed employees can safely access to corporate resources in cloud and hybrid networks. These solutions enable users to deal with the heightened cybersecurity risks in the times of uncertainty during the pandemic.

What major trends are you forecasting in the channel market?  

As the global economies are becoming more and more digitised, we are witnessing a significant growth in Microsoft 365 adoption, migrations of workloads into public cloud, and dissolving the traditional network perimeter to a flexible SASE model. There is a growing need for better and more reliable solutions for increased security when it comes to email protection, app & cloud security, network security and data protection. Over the last few years, we’ve watched our partners support their clients with digital transformations and modify their business methods and skillsets to meet their customers’ needs. Protecting customers digital assets and data stored within web applications should remain a focus for channel partners.

At the same time, we expect many organisations heavily investing in their security solutions as privacy will dominate the security discourse in 2022. Almost all countries have some form of privacy legislation. Data collected from clients must be protected and enhanced to comply with their privacy needs. As detection and response will get more complex, many companies, especially SMBs, will need some type of managed service to help them in this area.

How do you leverage Next-Gen Techs like AI and ML to address security issues?

Cyberattacks are becoming more complicated and capable of evading traditional safeguards, for example, attackers use various social engineering techniques to evade traditional email gateway and steal credentials or sensitive data. To meet advanced email threats, Barracuda leverages AL and ML capabilities to outsmart evolving email threats. Our new generation email security products like  Barracuda Phishing and Impersonation Protection and Barracuda Account Takeover Protection use artificial intelligence to detect behavioral, content, and link-forwarding irregularities in user company’s email conversations and protect user against social engineering attacks. We also leverage machine learning in Barracuda Cloud Application Protection (CAP) platform to process threat intelligence data and provide real-time responses and advanced bot protection to defend businesses against OWASP Top 10 Web & API threats.

Which areas are you focusing on in the channel – skillsets, sales and marketing, vertical and technology practice development, service capability, etc.?

Barracuda is a channel dedicated company. We’re committed to helping our partners acquire new business, answer client needs, and prosper together. Partner enablement is a key focus for us, for example, we have Barracuda Academy, a training program designed to provide our premier and preferred partners with the proper tools, training, and resources to sell Barracuda products successfully. Customers and partners can also use our self-paced Barracuda Campus and monthly webinar to brush up on skills, stay current on the threat landscape, and learn new security technologies. With the proper training, partners and customers can make informed judgments when it comes to picking products that will address the day-to-day security needs of any business, large or small. Also, we heavily invest in marketing and sales support services to support our channel partners and generate qualified leads, deal registration, co-op funding, ready-made programs and annual events. These programs help us, and our channel partners go to market with the best in the industry.

Cybersecurity is highly tech-intensive. How do you educate your partners to deliver in this highly challenging and competitive security landscape? 

As mentioned earlier, partner enablement is a key focus for us to keep our partners up to date with our products and the latest trends. We’ve launched Barracuda Academy, a channel partner dedicated training program to ensure our partners know our products and how they are helping customers in addressing security risks. Our monthly webinars with security experts, Threat Spotlight research cover the latest trends in threat landscape to educate our partners and customers are up to date to the evolving threats.

Are you planning any new product additions for the channel market?

As our channel partners continue to support customers in addressing heightened cyber threats in accelerated cloud adoption, Barracuda will continue to drive innovation and introduce relevant technology to the market in addressing customers’ needs across email, network, data and application security. While there is significant growth in Microsoft 365 adoption, we put effort in to make the most out of our partnership with Microsoft and deliver new solutions and business capabilities for our customers.

What’s your geospread? Is there any channel expansion plan in 2022?

Barracuda has footprint across the U.S., EMEA and APAC including India, and more than 200,000 organizations worldwide trust Barracuda to protect them. As a channel-dedicated business, partner recruitment is at the core of our business. We have always valued our partnerships and backed our channel partners in protecting their customers through the different stages of their business journeys and providing training and marketing and sales support as well as customer support.

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