Trade union benefits fund makes successive investments in Barracuda

Like any company, Barracuda really appreciates long-term, repeat customers. So it was a pleasure to speak with Brian Lesters, IT Manager for the Mid-America Carpenters Regional Council Benefit Funds, recently and to write up a case study about his organization’s journey with Barracuda firewall, backup, and email protection solutions.

Replacing difficult firewalls

When Lesters first came on board in 2013, he was dismayed to discover that the SonicWall network firewall appliances the organization had in place could only be configured and managed via an old-fashioned command-line interface. “They were amazingly difficult and complex to manage,” he said. “I don’t know how the guy I replaced was doing it …. That just wasn’t acceptable to me.”

So, he and his team looked around for a replacement and eventually settled on Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. The key selling points for Lesters?

“The Barracuda firewall had the advanced features we wanted. And the admin interface was very intuitive and easy to use, which means it’s saving us time, which is money.”

Support matters

The actual transition from SonicWall to Barracuda was challenging, as it involved extracting a lot of rules from the old firewalls and duplicating them in the new ones.

But that’s when Lesters and his team discovered a key feature of Barracuda that ended up being a major reason for them to stick with us for future IT investments. In Lesters’ words:

“Barracuda’s support team was with us the whole time. They stayed on the line, sharing our screen, and guiding us through the whole process until it was completely done, tested, and proven. I don’t know of any other vendor that delivers that level of support anymore. It really made an impression.”

Later, when COVID-19 sent everyone home, Lesters was also impressed by how easy it was to go remote with CloudGen Firewall’s proprietary TINA VPN protocol:

“We had never allowed any remote work here. So, it was a major cultural change to go remote basically overnight. And we were delighted at how easy it was. All we had to do was make sure everyone had the Barracuda VPN client installed, and it scaled easily and transparently.”

Staying with Barracuda

Considering how satisfied they were with CloudGen Firewall, Lesters and his team were not surprised that Barracuda Backup stood out for them when they decided to replace their finicky, time-consuming, and very costly tape-based system involving a third-party contract.

“[Barracuda Backup] was a huge improvement. I was able to cancel that third-party contract, which meant we were saving a lot of money right away.”

And when they began planning their migration to Microsoft 365, they again landed on Barracuda for a modern, cloud-based email-protection solution.

“Barracuda Email Protection, delivered as a cloud-hosted service, is exactly what we needed. It … provided excellent security for our on-prem email, and when we eventually moved to Microsoft 365, the transition was completely seamless and transparent.”

Peace of mind, outstanding support

Lesters sums up why he and his team are so happy with their ongoing relationship with Barracuda:

“Having the Barracuda solutions in place has given me terrific peace of mind. I think of Barracuda as a guardian standing at the gates and making sure nothing bad gets in. When you combine that peace of mind with the outstanding customer support that they provide, I look forward to having Barracuda as our cybersecurity partner for the long term.”