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Barracuda F-Series CloudGen Firewall: UTM Overview and Analysis

See our complete list of top UTM vendors Key Takeaways Barracuda gets high marks for value, ease of deployment and management, advanced threat detection, and support. Despite solid cloud offerings, including Google Cloud support, the company lacks CASB integration. Barracuda appliances also lack endpoint support and options for the smallest use cases. Company Description Barracuda […]

Written By: Drew Robb

Jul 23, 2018

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See our complete list of top UTM vendors

Key Takeaways
Company Description
Product Description
Markets and Use Cases
Metrics
Intelligence
Delivery
Agents
Pricing

Key Takeaways

Barracuda gets high marks for value, ease of deployment and management, advanced threat detection, and support. Despite solid cloud offerings, including Google Cloud support, the company lacks CASB integration. Barracuda appliances also lack endpoint support and options for the smallest use cases.

Company Description

Barracuda (NYSE: CUDA) offers cloud-enabled solutions that protect networks, applications and data. Its products are used by more than 150,000 organizations worldwide. Based in Silicon Valley, the company has over 1,000 employees, 5,000 partners and offices in 15 countries.

Product Description

Base functions of CloudGen products include firewall, application control, user awareness, intrusion prevention service (IPS), antivirus (Web, mail and FTP in proxy mode, as well as single-pass flow mode), gateway-based URL filter (in proxy mode, as well as single-pass flow mode), SSL interception and inspection, Web proxy with cache, unlimited site-to-site virtual private network (VPN), unlimited client-to-site VPN, and a spam filter. In addition, the company provides secure SD-WAN functionality, zero-touch deployment, cloud-based central management, advanced threat protection (ATP), SCADA and industrial control protocols enforcement, the Tunnel Independent Network Architecture VPN protocol, and CudaLaunch (a multi-platform VPN app for automated rollouts on Windows, macOS, iOS, Android). It is available on Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud Platform.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls are a cornerstone of its Total Threat Protection framework. Administration is said to be easy via a Web interface and free, cloud-based central management.

“In recent years, just about all UTM appliances have evolved to include application control beyond port and protocol, as well as sandboxing features for advanced persistent threat protection,” said Klaus Gheri, vice president and general manager of network security at Barracuda.

Markets and Use Cases

Key markets include USA, Canada and Europe, the Middle East and Asia (EMEA). Use cases include network perimeter protection from advanced threats and site-to-site connectivity for companies with up to 10 locations.

Metrics

Throughput ranges from 1 Gbps up to more than 40 Gbps for the firewall. As part of the pricing structure, there is no limitation in terms of VPN connections (neither for client-to-site nor for site-to-site connections).

Intelligence

Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection leverages a global threat intelligence network that ingests threat information from more than fifty million collection points around the world. These include more than 250,000 deployed Barracuda endpoints; honeypots, or decoys intended to attract the attention of threat actors and criminals; autonomous crawlers, bots that travel the internet actively seeking out new threats; third-party malware submissions; and analysis by Barracuda Labs. Analysis includes multiple layers of behavioral, heuristic and static code analysis as well as cloud-based sandboxing.

Delivery

Physical Appliances on-premises: From small desktop to large 2U devices

Virtual: VMware, Microsoft Hyper V, KVM, Citrix Xen, Open Xen

Cloud: Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, Microsoft Azure

Agents

Optional agents are available for automatic user authentication on Windows Domains, Windows Terminal Servers and Citrix Terminal Servers.

Pricing

Typical pricing for a Barracuda CloudGen Firewall F18 starts at $734 plus $136 for basic support and one-year updates.

Drew Robb

Originally from Scotland, Drew Robb has been a writer for more than 25 years. He lives in Florida and specializes in IT, engineering, and business. As well as eWeek and TechRepublic, he writes for a wide range of magazines including Gas Turbine World, SDxCentral, and HR Magazine. He is the author of Server Disk Management in a Windows Environment (Auerbach Publications).