Barracuda named CRN Tech Innovator finalist in two categories

Today, Barracuda Networks is being recognized as a finalist for the 2023 CRN Tech Innovator Awards in two categories: Managed Detection and Response and Network Security - SMB. These two awards recognize Barracuda XDR, an extended detection and response (XDR) platform backed by an innovative 24×7x365 security operations center (SOC), and Barracuda CloudGen Access, a Zero Trust solution that establishes unparalleled access control across users and devices without the performance pitfalls of a traditional VPN.

Each year in the Tech Innovator Awards, CRN highlights products spanning the IT industry in a range of technology categories such as cloud, infrastructure, security, software, and devices. The awards showcase offerings that not only bring significant advancements in technology, but also create partner growth opportunities.

CRN Tech Innovator recognition: Q&A with Shani Mahler and Sinan Eren

To learn more about the latest innovation from these two unique solutions, we sat down with Barracuda’s own Shani Mahler, Product Management Director of Barracuda XDR, and Sinan Eren, VP, Zero Trust Access.

Q: Shani and Sinan, can you share what sets Barracuda XDR and Barracuda CloudGen Access apart from the competition?

Shani: Barracuda XDR is an open XDR that supports over 40 integrations for monitoring. Barracuda XDR covers more assets utilized by our customers than any other vendor in the market. Our monitoring is not just broad, but we also go deep. Barracuda XDR has hundreds of rules looking for risks in our customers’ environments. We also have layered monitoring to ensure we identify malicious activities quickly. We have all the benefits of an XDR, without all the noise. On top of all this, our SOC teams are globally located, ensuring that no matter what or when, we are serving our customers.  

Sinan: Barracuda CloudGen Access offers the market’s most intuitive and delightful user experience for both the IT department and their end users in relation to its peers in the Zero Trust access category. This sets it apart as being a force multiplier for employee productivity. CloudGen Access is a true enabler for productivity and efficiency beyond its security features. We offer modern authentication solutions like passwordless single sign-on (SSO) to company applications, ultimately helping streamline employee access as well as saving them a significant amount of time every working day. The passwordless SSO feature applies to both on-premises and SaaS applications and is a unique and differentiated feature in comparison to our peers.

CloudGen Access supports all seven endpoint platforms natively including Linux Desktop, which is popular with engineering organizations. Additionally, the product is application and infrastructure agnostic and can be deployed to any environment, to any platform, and supports any flavor of application including legacy ones.

In the realm of compliance, Barracuda CloudGen Access offers a built-in web security capability to enforce content filtering for company owned and operated devices. This feature is also unique to CloudGen Access and comes bundled-in without any additional cost to the customer.

Q: What are some future innovations partners can look forward to?

Shani: Barracuda XDR is striving to monitor each customer’s entire digital footprint. Therefore, we will be delivering more supported integrations to ensure we can monitor any IT infrastructure. Additionally, the time from initial compromise to remediation is critical to minimize damages and costs. Look for more SOAR features to automate the response activities and minimize this time. Also, look for features that will help reduce risks around ransomware and BEC specifically.

Sinan: Barracuda CloudGen Access will continue to focus on partner-centric service offerings around identity and secure access going forward. We will continue to innovate scalable single-sign-on solutions that are phishing-resistant and that partners can easily deploy and use to secure their customer base. We will also continue to evolve our authorization policies around device posture and security and integrate additional third-party services for additional security telemetry.

Barracuda is honored to receive this recognition. To learn more about these innovative solutions, please visit www.barracuda.com.