Tuscaloosa Schools goes all-in with Barracuda—find out why

Some customers see the value and reliability they get from Barracuda—and get used to our incomparable support teams—and decide to stick with us to provide their complete security, network optimization, and remote access infrastructure. 

Tuscaloosa County School System is one such customer. Beginning years back with an email security gateway appliance, they now use all of the following:

• Barracuda Email Protection

• Barracuda Backup

• Barracuda SecureEdge

• Barracuda CloudGen Firewall

• Barracuda CloudGen Access

• Barracuda Application Protection

With 38 locations and about 19,000 students to protect, Director of Information Technology Brad Jessen was determined to build a complete, integrated security infrastructure for the county system. Get the whole story in the complete case study.

A trusted partner

Brad’s predecessor in the job had built a relationship with Barracuda, and Brad saw no reason not to continue it as he filled the need for a modern, zero-trust access system; advanced security for Office 365; backup that helps him conform to state guidance; centralized management for his distributed network; and more.

One reason Brad is happy to keep working with Barracuda as his cybersecurity partner is the quality and dedication of Barracuda's support and sales teams.

“I can’t say enough about Barracuda support and sales personnel. Unlike so many other vendors, they are always one hundred percent focused on figuring out the best solution for whatever issue we’re having. That goes for any kind of technical issue — they actively educate us, and they get creative about finding solutions to fit our specific needs.” — Brad Jessen, Director of Information Technology, Tuscaloosa County School System

Easy to buy for K-12

Barracuda sales teams understand and are sensitive to the unique budgeting and funding processes and constraints that affect K-12 tech spending—something Brad values:

“For a school district, budgeting and spending is very constrained, and where other vendors might say ‘well, that’s our billing structure, sorry,’ Barracuda folks do everything possible to accommodate our situation and make sure we can get the security we need.”— Brad Jessen, Director of Information Technology, Tuscaloosa County School System

Fast, easy response to attacks

Brad calls out a lot of features and capabilities in this full-scale case study. Here’s what he has to say about Incident Response, a component of Email Protection that’s invaluable when protecting large numbers of middle- and high-school users.

“We are very happy with Incident Response. When a malicious email does get into users’ inboxes, we can find and delete every instance with just a few clicks. That dramatically cuts down on the time users have to click on or respond to something that they shouldn’t — we’re literally resolving these incidents in mere minutes.” — Brad Jessen, Director of Information Technology Tuscaloosa County School System

Find out everything Brad and his team had to say about working with Barracuda to provide a wide range of capabilities, in the full case study.