Barracuda Networks unveiled BarracudaONE today, an AI-powered centralized interface for MSPs and partners to manage Barracuda Email Protection, Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, and Barracuda Data Inspector. At the core of BarracudaONE are reporting capabilities that deliver actionable insights, making threat data easier to interpret and communicate, and enabling informed decision making, according to the company.
Barracuda’s Brian Downey, vice president of product management, tells MSP Success that the BarracudaONE platform and associated dashboards provide “the ability for managed service providers to be able to go in and quickly understand what’s happening and take action in their environments.” This includes identifying if their tools are configured incorrectly.
A Look at BarracudaONE and the Tool Sprawl Challenge
BarracudaONE addresses the security tool sprawl MSPs are struggling with, which puts their customers at risk, Downey says, pointing to new research the company also unveiled today. Commissioned by Barracuda from Vanson Bourne, the research shows that 65% of organizations believe they have too many security tools, and over half (53%) say their tools can’t be integrated. This lack of integration weakens defenses, with 77% saying it hinders detection and 78% citing challenges in threat mitigation.
In addition, only 32% of respondents are fully confident that their security tools are properly configured, leaving organizations vulnerable to breaches caused by hidden misconfigurations, the research concludes.
Downey says what they’ve been hearing from their MSP partners mirrors the survey’s findings. “Very similar to the results from Vanson Bourne, they started talking about these challenges with multiple products. So [BarracudaONE] was a natural evolution, based on where our customers had been asking us to go.”
He continues, “We talked to a lot of MSPs and this is nothing unique to Barracuda. It’s across all their tools. They start their day by going into each tool to check to make sure nothing bad happened, something simple like a failure or something that was blocked. They have to do that in each tool, each one with their own username and password. Their techs have to be trained and they need to repeat that for every client.” BarracudaONE provides MSPs with a holistic view of their environments and enables them to prioritize critical tasks, he says. For techs, it “allows everything to start at that dashboard experience, but be able to dive easily into the other tools when needed for more detail.”
Downey says the company will continue to add support for more Barracuda products to BarracudaONE. “You’ll see that happening over the next few months,” he says.
As for supporting non-Barracuda products, Downey says right now [we’re] focusing on the Barracuda tools, but it allows us to create a foundation that can easily be extended to other tools … depending on where customers want us to go.”
The Move to Platforms
With so many channel vendors positioning themselves as “platforms” in today’s market, MSP Success asked Downey how MSPs can discern what makes a true platform.
“We’ve always been a platform vendor,” he says. “Our AI technologies span all of our tools. When we find something happening in attacks that are happening in the network, we’re able to quickly understand and be able to educate and put in place AI algorithms to be able to correct them across other tools. What we’re really talking about [with BarracudaONE] is we’re pulling that together with a set of dashboards now sitting on top of those tools.”
He adds, “Platform is a very big word and it can mean a lot of different things to different people. So I think the real question is, what can you accomplish with the platform? What value does it actually add? And that’s the reason why we’re so happy with BarracudaONE. We started with, ‘what problems are we trying to solve?’ We didn’t start with, ‘let’s create something that we can message as a platform.’ So because of that, we see it as a high value proposition for customers. We see it as being able to help with that management efficiency … and to now have more productive conversations with their clients. And we see it as something where the more products that you’re using that are integrated with this platform, the more power it has.”
BarracudaONE is now available at no additional cost to MSPs already using Barracuda Email Protection, Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, and Barracuda Data Inspector.
