By Charles F Moreira
At the same time, information security issues affect especially small to medium enterprises (SMEs) according to Thiban Darmalingam, the Regional Manager for Barracuda Networks in Malaysia.
“It is very common for IT departments especially amongst SMEs to deploy a different product for every type of threat, and these individual products create security silos, blind spots, and are an operations nightmare,” said Thiban, whilst announcing Barracuda Networks’ new Total Threat Protection initiative that helps simplify information security for resource constrained organisations such as SMEs.
It does so by combining the value of best-of-breed products with common management to help ensure protection and alleviate the administrative burden.
“Malicious attacks frequently exploit weaknesses across an organisation’s network, making it imperative for a company to deploy an integrated approach for Total Threat Protection. According to Verizon’s 2014 Data Breach Report, web application attacks were associated with the highest number of breaches for any specific threat,” Thiban added.
Like a chain, an organisation’s network is only as strong as its weakest link and with organisations and users being more connected today than ever before, at the same time they are increasing their exposure to malicious attacks, as attackers continue to evolve their methods, leaving every organisation vulnerable, regardless of size.
Security vulnerabilities that expose an organisation’s infrastructure to potential security breaches are constantly in the news. For example, an automated SQL injection attack called CyberVor resulted in 1.2 billion user names and passwords being stolen from over 420,000 websites and 35% of all breaches reported involved hacked web applications.
Total threat protection
The problem with organisations using solutions from multiple vendors to secure their network are that they can be complex, expensive, are plagued by integration issues, management complexity and disjointed support that can create security gaps. On the other hand, all-in-one solutions which are affordable and easy to deploy often face feature and performance constraints, and do not scale well with the organisation as it expands.
So to provide total protection, Barracuda’s cloud-based Total Threat Protection integrates best-of-breed security components to provide real-time protection against advanced threats. Each component provides comprehensive protection on its own respective vector, whether it is email, Web application, remote access, and mobile. It also scales with an organisation and evolves with a constantly changing threat landscape.
Total Threat Protection provides comprehensive features and scalable performance, whilst it simplifies management through consistent user interfaces and cloud-based centralised management, whilst flexible deployment options allow it to be implemented across any attack surface. Because of this, it is well suited for IT professionals who need to multi-task and for organisations such as SMEs which are faced with resource and budget constraints.
It secures all threat vectors including network, user, email, Web application, remote access, and mobile; it scales across all threat vectors with best-of-breed components; it protects all attack surfaces with flexible deployment options including on-premises, virtual, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), public cloud, and integrated suites; it simplifies management with consistent user interfaces and central management; and ensures business continuity with included hardware refresh every four years.
Affordable next-gen security
Barracuda provides all next-generation application control and user identity functions in easy-to-use and affordable solutions with all-inclusive pricing. It simplifies the investment in network and content security by improving the performance, availability, and security of your distributed networks.
Easy deployment
The Barracuda Firewall provides all next-generation application control and user identity functions, outperforming traditional firewalls and unifying threat management by integrating a powerful next-generation firewall appliance with scalable cloud content security.
Whilst the appliance is optimised for bandwidth-sensitive tasks like packet forwarding and routing, Layer 7 application control, Intrusion Prevention (IPS), DNS/DHCP services, and VPN connectivity, the cloud component handles processor-intensive tasks like virus scanning, content filtering, and reporting.
Administration is easy with an intuitive web interface and free, cloud-based central management. The combination of ease-of-use, powerful next-generation features, and affordability makes the Barracuda Firewall most suitable for SMEs.
The Barracuda Firewall anchors Barracuda’s modular security framework, which integrates purpose-built, best-of-breed, highly scalable security solutions to protect users, networks, and data centre applications.
Components like Web and email security, web application security, and secure remote access integrate with the firewall, and can be centrally managed for aggregated visibility and control. This is paired with consistent user interfaces and common administrative workflows to provide a comprehensive security posture, simplified administration, and a highly scalable architecture.
Next-gen firewall
The Barracuda NG (next generation) Firewall is an enterprise-grade next-generation firewall that was purpose-built for efficient deployment and operation within dispersed, highly dynamic, and security-critical network environments.
In addition to next-generation firewall protection, it provides industry-leading operations efficiency and added business value by safe-guarding network traffic against line outages and link quality degradation.
User identity and application awareness are used to select the best network path, traffic priority, and available bandwidth for business-critical traffic. In case of line failure, the Barracuda NG Firewall can transparently move traffic to alternative lines and keep traffic flowing.
The Barracuda NG Firewall meets enterprise requirements of massive scalability, efficient configuration and lifecycle management across dispersed networks, and performance guarantees for business-critical applications. The concept of integrated WAN optimisation coupled with industry-leading centralised management results in significantly lower overall operational cost for multi-site deployments.
All policies, client, and device settings are centrally managed and tracked by the Barracuda NG Control Centre.
Security and privacy
Today’s road warriors and remote workers require a quick, flexible, reliable, and completely secure way to connect to internal business applications, information, and network resources. They want to do this from anywhere in the world, at any time, from any suitable device. The Barracuda SSL VPN provides the security and connectivity to provide this access, via a Web browser or mobile device.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall provides superior protection against data loss, application-layer DDoS, as well as known and previously unknown zero-day application-layer attack methods.
With hundreds of lines of code to check – and vulnerabilities often subtle and hard to find – a serious data breach is often the first sign that a Web application has problems. Having secured thousands of production applications against more than 11 billion attacks since 2008, the Barracuda Web Application Firewall is the ideal solution for organisations looking to protect applications from data breaches and defacement.
The Barracuda Web Application Firewall relieves administrators from having to wait for clean code or even know how an application works to secure their applications.
Organisations can ensure robust security with a Barracuda Web Application Firewall hardware or virtual appliance, deployed either on-premises or in the cloud to protect companies’ servers, applications, and data from web-based attacks.
Barracuda Web Application Firewall version 7.9.1 is available at no additional charge to existing customers on the current hardware platform with an active Energize Updates subscription or with an active virtual appliance license.
Complete email security
Today’s IT professionals need an easy-to-manage and comprehensive email security solution. In addition to keeping email-borne attacks outside the network, Barracuda Email Security Service provides email continuity and data leak prevention—at one affordable price.
The Barracuda Spam Firewall manages all inbound and outbound email traffic to protect organisations from email-borne threats and data leaks. As a complete email management solution, organisations can encrypt messages and leverage the cloud to spool email if mail servers become unavailable.
The Barracuda Spam Firewall is offered without per-user or per-feature fees, and is also available as a virtual appliance. A hosted email security service is also offered by Barracuda.
All-in-one protection
For most businesses, email is their primary means of communication with the outside world but at the same time, it also exposes businesses to a variety of threats from time-wasting spam to data theft, hacking and viruses.
Barracuda’s Email Security Service is the most comprehensive and cost-effective way to protect businesses against all of the threats associated with business email. It comes as a single solution providing protection against spam, email-borne viruses (inbound and outbound), email-based malware, data leaks, phishing emails, undelivered emails, unsecured emails and denial of Service attacks.
Web security
Barracuda provides a comprehensive solution for web security and management, protect distributed locations and remote users against web-borne threats malware, and virus protection with a powerful policy and reporting engine. Advanced features ensure that organisations adapt to emerging requirements like social-network regulation, remote filtering, and visibility into SSL-encrypted traffic.
The Barracuda Web Filter lets organisations benefit from online applications and tools without exposure to web-borne malware and viruses, lost user productivity, and misused bandwidth.
As a comprehensive solution for web security and management, it also unites award-winning spyware, malware, and virus protection with a powerful policy and reporting engine. Advanced features ensure that organisations adapt to emerging requirements like social-network regulation, remote filtering, and visibility into SSL-encrypted traffic.
Unlimited remote user licenses are included to enforce content and access policies for mobile devices outside of the corporate network. The Barracuda Web Filter is also available as a virtual appliance.
As a cloud-based service, the Barracuda Web Security Service provides a convenient option to deploy Barracuda’s powerful web security technology for organisations looking to leverage the scalability and flexibility of the cloud.
