Organizations of all sizes face unprecedented security challenges. These attacks often are targeted and increasingly sophisticated, and security professionals are being asked to address these risks across an increasingly complicated IT infrastructure.
Barracuda’s Total Threat Protection initiative is designed to help security professionals address the dangerous threat landscape while working smarter and more efficiently. Barracuda Total Threat Protection is aimed at providing customers an easy, cost-effective way to secure multiple threat vectors – including email, web applications, remote access, web browsing, mobile Internet, and network perimeters – that span private and public cloud deployments. It combines award-winning, scalable solutions that share common management interfaces allowing for centralized administration. The streamlined configuration, management and monitoring can reduce the operational burden on IT.
A recent study by Enterprise Strategy Group found that 25 percent of firms surveyed reported that while information security remains a top priority, it also is the number one gap to fill.
“Every year we ask IT leaders to identify areas where they have a ‘problematic shortage’ of IT skills, and the lack of information security expertise appears at the top of the list on an annual basis,” said Jon Oltsik, a senior analyst with Enterprise Strategy Group, a leading IT market research firm. “It is very common for IT departments to deploy a different product for every type of threat, and these individual products create security silos, blind spots, and an operations nightmare. Barracuda’s Total Threat Protection initiative may be attractive because it combines the value of best-of-breed products with common management to help ensure protection and alleviate the administrative burden.”
Total Threat Protection Must Protect Web Applications
Malicious attacks frequently exploit weaknesses across an organization’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.
To help customers protect against web application attacks, Barracuda continues to enhance the security capabilities of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Security highlights of its latest version include:
•URL Encryption: Encrypts every URL within the response body before sending to clients, never exposing those URLs externally, and provides a strong mechanism for forceful browsing prevention. By encrypting URLs, organizations can prevent forceful browsing attacks and prevent attackers from understanding the structure of their web applications.
•SSL Enhancements: Supports Perfect Forward Secrecy (PFS) associated ciphers. Through PFS, organizations can improve the integrity of their encrypted communications – even past communications in the event keys are ever compromised.
•Improved User Access Control: Allows for user authentication across multiple domains and dual authentication against LDAP and RSA SecurID / Radius with OTP. Through multi-factor authentication methods, organizations can better secure access control and authorizations into all or portions of their web applications, depending on risk.
In addition, as organizations continue to deploy protection, the latest Barracuda Web Application Firewall version also includes enhancements to its administrative interface:
•New Templates Module: Includes a new, powerful wizard-based UI for creating and using configuration templates for virtually any object or policy in the system.
•Robust Reporting: Offers more than 40 ready-to-use reports, including geographical breakdown, and allows administrators to filter reports by security and traffic events, or by timeframe, services, and Top Count.
“The latest release of the Barracuda Web Application Firewall exemplifies our commitment to Total Threat Protection,” said Stephen Pao, GM Security, Barracuda. “We have added new safeguards such as URL Encryption to enhance application security while driving operational enhancements such as advanced reporting. Our goal is to make sure customers with budget and staff constraints can affordably protect every network threat vector.”
Deploying Total Threat Protection
A comprehensive portfolio and management simplicity are critical elements of the Total Threat Protection initiative. Barracuda’s innovation agenda also extends to making products easy to purchase and deploy. Security solutions are available as physical appliances, virtual appliances, as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), and through public clouds including Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure.
