A passion for security

Most of the IT managers that I interview for customer case studies can be sorted into two groups.

Both of them are seriously concerned about security. But in the first group are admins who think of security as an unfortunate requirement that takes resources away from tasks that serve their organizations’ primary business goals.

These IT folks prefer not to get into the weeds of security any more than necessary. So, they especially value their Barracuda security services and platforms for how simple and reliable they are. “They just work” is a comment I hear from them a lot.

The second group includes folks who are excited and interested about all the details of their security infrastructure and love to be involved in it hands-on. These people also appreciate the simplicity and reliability of Barracuda’s services and solutions. But even more than that, they love the process of choosing and configuring specific capabilities, and they are thrilled when new features and products appear in response to the evolving threat landscape.

Building a secure network from the ground up

Bill Mann, CISO for the Borough of West Chester in Pennsylvania (get the complete case study here), is firmly in the second group. He began in the borough’s police dispatch organization in 1986, and as he got promoted to head that department, he also took on the role of designing and managing an IT network for West Chester. Eventually that led him to move from police dispatch to leading the IT department as CISO.

He originally took on his IT role partly because it was fascinating to him, but also because he was very concerned about security and wanted to make sure the network was designed and built from the ground up with security as a primary consideration.

“I’ve really seen the threats evolve and grow over time. The danger for organizations that don’t take security seriously is real and scary.”

— Bill Mann, Chief Information Security Officer, Borough of West Chester

As he began building his IT network, he chose Barracuda NextGen Firewall appliances to secure the borough’s infrastructure, and he has nothing but good things to say about that choice.

Early to the cloud, and early to SaaS security

An early adopter (just ask him about the time he issued Windows phones to everyone), Bill decided in 2009 to migrate to Microsoft Online (now Microsoft 365) rather than buying a new on-premises Exchange server — possibly making West Chester the first government entity in the Northeast to do so.

As always, security was top of mind for him. And Barracuda is where he turned to first.

“Having used the firewalls, basically from then on I just went to Barracuda first for security. So for email, we started with the Barracuda gateway product to stop spam and malware and use ATP for advanced threat detection.”

— Bill Mann, Chief Information Security Officer, Borough of West Chester

New threats and new capabilities

As he observed the emergence of new kinds of threats over time, Bill repeatedly turned to Barracuda for new and more powerful security capabilities — to the point where today he and his team have every element of the Barracuda Email Protection platform in full production.

“Our infrastructure has four main pillars that together give me huge peace of mind. Gateway/ATP defense, Impersonation Protection, Incident Response, and Security Awareness Training. … We also use Barracuda Web Security, Domain Fraud Protection, Cloud-to-Cloud Backup, Archiving, and Data Inspector.”

— Bill Mann, Chief Information Security Officer, Borough of West Chester

Commitment to ongoing security improvement

Bill’s passion for security isn’t about to change. And neither is his reliance on Barracuda.

“We’ve been extremely satisfied with Barracuda. Growing our infrastructure with their help has been a great way to stay ahead of the growth of advanced threats. I fully expect to continue using Barracuda as our primary security partner for the foreseeable future.”

To get the whole story, including all the details of how Bill benefits from each of the Barracuda security capabilities in his infrastructure, download the complete case study.