Building success: Continental Office and Barracuda

Barracuda customers include some large, technologically sophisticated organizations with complex needs, globe-spanning networks, and massive dependence on real-time cloud connectivity.

But they also include a lot of mid-size brick-and-mortar companies with limited IT needs and resources. And yet, even these companies are finding themselves increasingly dependent on advanced cloud applications and services. And, of course, all of them experienced the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting shift to widespread remote work.

Meet Michael Grinko

Michael Grinko is the Vice President of Business Technology at Continental Office. Founded in 1939, the company started out as a designer and manufacturer of high-quality office furniture. But over the years, they’ve expanded their services. Today they design and create commercial interior spaces, using custom designed furniture and flooring, interior construction, experiential graphics, and wraparound consulting services to ensure their clients get exactly the interior spaces they want and need.

When I interviewed Grinko in preparation for writing up a customer case study about Continental Office, he told me that in the 31 years he’d been with the company, he’d seen a lot of technological change.

“When we first digitized some of our data and operations, we chose an open-source firewall called Untangle. We didn’t have much of an IT budget back then, and it was OK for most of our needs. Web filtering was our main concern then, blocking employees from accessing inappropriate sites.”

Better firewalls ease the remote-work transition

Fast-forward to 2014, and Continental Office upgraded to a modern IT infrastructure with high-end servers running VMWare. That’s when they decided to get an enterprise-grade firewall. Grinko’s team chose Barracuda CloudGen Firewall deployed as virtual appliances in all five of their locations.

They liked the features, the ease of use, and the Hardware Refresh program that ensured they would periodically swap out their equipment for the latest versions. But one of the biggest benefits was only revealed in 2020 when the company — like lots of others — had to make an abrupt shift to remote work.

“When the COVID-19 lockdown came, my bosses asked me what we needed to buy or do to prepare for everyone working at home. I told them nothing. The Barracuda VPN built into the firewalls was completely reliable and secure, and very intuitive to set up.”

Better backup saves time and money — not only for IT

Grinko and his team also opted to upgrade from tape-based data backup to a modern system. And — largely because CloudGen Firewall had been so satisfying — they chose Barracuda Backup.

To find out just how much of IT’s time the new solution saved — and to see why Grinko says it’s making the whole organization more efficient — be sure to check out the full case study.

When you do, you’ll also see something that literally every single customer I’ve ever spoken to makes a point of telling me: that the value of Barracuda involves more than just excellent, easy-to-use products.

“A major benefit of Barracuda is just the company’s culture and values. The support team is amazing, and in general it’s clear that everyone at Barracuda is committed to putting the customer’s needs front and center ... That makes a difference, and you’d have a hard time selling me on another vendor at this point. I feel like Barracuda is our security partner.”

Honestly, I never get tired of hearing that.