Why Turlock USD sticks with Barracuda email security

If you first became a Barracuda customer way back at our founding, when we released our first product, Barracuda Spam Filter v. 1.0—and if you’ve stuck with us as your email protection vendor ever since—then you’re in a very elite category, and I’d love to talk to you about it. Seriously, drop me a line.

Robert Brogdon, Director of Technology Operations for the 15-school Turlock Unified School District, doesn’t go back quite that far. But when I spoke with him recently, he was eager to talk about why he’s relied on Barracuda email security solutions for nearly all the 24 years he’s been with the district. Get the whole story by reading the full case study we created together.

Spoiler alert—It boils down to two things:

1. As the email threat landscape has evolved over the years, he’s always been able to count on Barracuda to deliver advanced new capabilities to address new categories of threats.

2. No matter how much and how rapidly the technology has evolved, Barracuda email security has remained consistently easy to use, simple to manage, and reliably effective.

From on-prem to the cloud

Bogdon started with our on-prem email gateway appliance. “We were very happy with it. It just worked,” he says.

After a couple of years, he followed up with Barracuda Message Archiver, another on-prem appliance. It was a huge help, he says, with state regulatory compliance, Public Records Act requests, and personnel investigations. 

Fast-forward to a few years ago, and new threats started causing problems. “Some of our staff fell for gift-card scams from impersonation emails and lost their own money doing it. And in a couple of cases, staffers gave up their network credentials.”

Upgrading to Barracuda Email Protection in the cloud brought a lot of new capabilities that helped with the new threats.  And when Bogdon and his team migrated the district to Microsoft 365, they were able to implement the AI-based Impersonation Protection and automated Incident Response capabilities.

As Bogdon says, “That’s when we really saw a major drop in the number of threats getting in — and started saving a lot of IT person-hours over our previous manual incident response processes using PowerShell scripts.”

Easy and reliable

Now Bogdon takes sophisticated impersonation attacks, like a recent one impersonating the district superintendent, in stride. “Since we implemented Impersonation Protection as part of Barracuda Email Protection a couple of months ago, it’s detected and blocked about a hundred impersonation attempts, including that one.”

And when occasional malicious emails do get into people’s mailboxes, it’s still no problem. “Just yesterday, I had to find and pull 16 instances of a malicious email from 16 inboxes, and it took me a few minutes — on a Sunday morning, while I was out of the house.”

Get all the details and find out why, after many years and many changes, Bogdon has never had a reason to seek a different provider for his email security needs.