“We envision a safer world for businesses everywhere.”—HatemNaguib, President and CEO of Barracuda

The COVID-19 pandemic forced many brick and mortar firms to move much of their business online—e.g., allowing employees to work from home, signing up for new SaaS services, introducing new e-commerce stores, or expanding their existing ones. While this sudden change helped maintain business continuity, protect employee safety, and recover lost to decreased foot traffic, the rapid shift to online business also introduced multiple security and data protection issues.

There is a level of trust in cloud computing that has permeated our daily lives. The illusion that the cloud is a magical place where your data is easily recoverable and available on all your devices is incredibly naïve and problematic.

If you have data living in the cloud and e-commerce business, you should be taking cybersecurity seriously.

Several cloud services are readily available for businesses to improve their day-to-day operations, including Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and other Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) providers. These services have allowed organizations to expand and grow their business. But while AWS and GCP excel in helping enterprises deploy Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products, they may not offer sufficient protection for data stored in the cloud.

At first glance, cloud computing and cybersecurity might like polar opposites. The first requires storing your data off-site, and the second requires building virtual walls around it, protecting your data at all costs.Should these two approaches clash?

Quite the opposite: As more and more businesses move their computing and data to the cloud, we see a symbiotic relationship develop between the two seemingly different practices—out of necessity.

One of the best cloud cybersecurity providers in the world is Barracuda.Barracuda strives to make the world a safer place. They believe every business deserves access to cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy and use. Barracuda protects email, networks, data, and applications with innovative solutions that grow and adapt with their customers’ journey. More than 200,000 organizations worldwide trust Barracuda to protect them in ways they may not even know they are at risk so they can focus on taking their business to the next level.

Barracuda started as a simple idea—providing an email-security solution that every business could afford. Fifteen years later, Barracuda is still growing, innovating, and focused on bringing customers tomorrow’s IT-security technology today.

State-of-the-art efficient and reliable advanced threat protection

Modern cyber attacks are swiftly growing in volume and sophistication. New malware strains are designed to evade traditional detection techniques and are often spread through targeted, zero-hour attacks. And these new malware variants are appearing quicker and in more significant numbers than ever before—new ransomware variants alone are predicted to occur at a rate of more than 200 per quarter for the foreseeable future.

Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection is an integrated cloud-based service that analyzes traffic across all major threat vectors.

Stopping advanced threats from reaching users and data needs a layered defense. In a 2016 independent test conducted by AV-Comparatives and MRG Effitas, the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, with Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection technology-enabled, was the only solution tested to achieve 100-percent effectiveness, along with a zero-percent rate of false positives.

Barracuda’s multi-layer defense pre-filters possible threats using increasingly sophisticated analysis, to optimize efficiency and ensure rapid response to any attack without compromising customer network performance or security policies.

LAYER 1—Advanced Threat Signatures

Barracuda maintains a massive database of known threat signatures that can be used to detect and block any available threat. Whenever a new threat is recognized, its signature is immediately added to Barracuda’s database and shared across all its security products and subscribers in real-time.

LAYER 2—Behavioral and Heuristic Analysis

Any unblocked email or data at Layer 1 is subjected to behavioral and heuristic analysis at Layer 2. Questionable code and scripts are analyzed in a controlled environment in this layer. Layer 2 looks for suspicious activities such as replication, file overwrites, and obfuscation attempts.

LAYER 3—Static Code Analysis

Barracuda’s static code analysis examines parts of any executable file to find questionable code without actually executing the code. This layer is a fast and highly effective method of pre-filtering malware before sending suspicious files onto the final sandboxing layer.

LAYER 4—CPU-Emulation Sandboxing

The final layer of Barracuda’s analysis is a comprehensive CPU emulation-based sandbox that destroys any suspect files that have survived the previous layers. Using CPU emulation, the Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection can detect threats designed to avoid traditional virtualization-based sandboxes.

Barracuda Advanced Threat Protection pulls a global threat intelligence network that consumes vast amounts of diverse threat information from millions of collection points worldwide. These include deployed Barracuda endpoints; autonomous crawlers, bots that travel the internet actively seeking out new threats; decoys or honeypots intended to attract the attention of cyber threat actors and criminals; third-party malware submissions; and analysis by Barracuda Labs.

All this information comes together to create the most up-to-date possible view of the threat environment. This is shared in real-time with all Barracuda deployments with Advanced Threat Protection enabled—giving you the best protection against advanced threats in the industry.

Protecting the cloud through the deployment of sophisticated cloud-first security services

Hatem Naguib is the President and CEO of Barracuda. Hatem joined Barracuda in 2016, bringing more than 25 years of experience building and delivering innovative products in enterprise software, cloud services, data center virtualization, software-defined networking, and security.

Under his leadership, the team has successfully launched several emails, Network, Application Security, and integrated product offerings.

“We are here to protect and support our customers for life.”