The Latest Barracuda News
Product and Solution Information, Press Releases, Announcements

New Additions to Barracuda NG Firewall, Barracuda Firewall, and Barracuda Web Filter Improve Deployment Choices for Integrating Content and Network Security Functions

CAMPBELL, Calif - June 15, 2015– Barracuda Networks, Inc. (NYSE: CUDA) -

Press Release Highlights:

• Barracuda enhanced its next-generation firewall products improving support for transparently redirecting traffic, which allows easier integration between discrete firewall and web security appliances.
• Barracuda Firewall, designed for single-site K-12 environments, now supports Safe Search and YouTube for Schools, features often included only with dedicated web security solutions.
• Barracuda Web Filter now includes an improved application engine for more advanced accuracy and detection, enabling application visibilities for organizations with legacy Layer 3/Layer 4 firewalls.

“Many organizations, particularly schools, carefully consider the choice of consolidating or separating their firewall and web filtering solutions as they balance their security needs, performance requirements, and existing infrastructure,” said Stephen Pao, GM Security, Barracuda. “The recent enhancements made to Barracuda’s firewall and web security products allow education customers to deploy best-in-class web security architectures, either integrated as a feature of their next-generation firewalls, or integrated as discrete firewall and web security appliances.”

Transparent Redirect

For schools looking for a simple way to deploy next-generation firewall and web security from a single vendor, Barracuda has added a new transparent redirect feature available on both the Barracuda NG Firewall and the Barracuda Firewall. These additions enable the Barracuda next-generation firewall products to cleanly hand off web traffic to the Barracuda Web Filter without inline connections.

By deploying next-generation firewall and web filtering as separate appliances, organizations enjoy the performance benefits of independently scaling fast packet inspection and full web proxy functions, each of which has a different latency profile. In addition, as a full web proxy, the Barracuda Web Filter offers a number of more advanced security functions not typically present in firewall solutions, including content policy alerting, and advanced granular reporting.

This deployment strategy supports the Barracuda Total Threat Protection initiative, aimed at providing powerful, integrated security protection across multiple threat vectors at an affordable cost, simplifying information security for resource-constrained organizations, such as schools.

“With the rapid growth in the number of connections generated and the amount of bandwidth consumed, it’s critical that our network security solution can grow with our changing requirements. Additionally, we were adamant about maintaining the level of granularity in policy enforcement found in traditional proxy solutions,” said Joseph Magazu, Director of Technology, Paulsboro Public Schools. “Using the Barracuda Firewall and Barracuda Web Filter together has not only given us the ability to scale as our infrastructure grows, but it has also provided us with better visibility into all the network traffic across our students and staff. The integrated Barracuda portfolio allows our organization to easily keep our security infrastructure in pace with the evolving threat landscape.”

Safe Access and Search Capabilities

For organizations looking to take advantage of integrated web security functions built into next-generation firewalls, Barracuda continues to add web security functions to its-next generation firewall products. These additions can be specifically targeted at some of the more advanced needs of K-12 organizations.

For example, Barracuda recently announced enforcement for Safe Search on major search engines (Google, Yahoo, Bing, etc.), and YouTube for Schools with the latest version of Barracuda NG Firewall designed for large, multi-site school district deployments.

With this announcement, Barracuda is extending those capabilities and adding Safe Search and YouTube for Schools support with the latest version of Barracuda Firewall, designed for smaller, single-site, K-12 organizations. Administrators now can implement Safe Search and YouTube for Schools enforcement across Barracuda next-generation firewall and web security products.

Application Detection Capabilities

Enabling the existing firewalls and existing rule sets to remain in place, Barracuda now enables customers to further realize the benefits of application detection through the addition of Barracuda Web Filter. This is particularly useful for schools and other organizations with legacy Layer 3/Layer 4 firewalls that are not yet ready to move to next-generation firewalls.

The latest version of Barracuda Web Filter brings improved performance and higher accuracy for application profiling by introducing a new underlying application detection engine. This new engine introduces control for hundreds of additional protocols and applications to the Barracuda Web Filter’s already extensive application database, while enhancing the overall performance.