Q&A: New Barracuda Email Protection advancements

We’re thrilled to announce exciting new advancements to Barracuda Email Protection. These updates — including flexible deployment options, enhanced security capabilities, and more — make it easier than ever for organizations of all sizes and IT environments to defend against increasingly sophisticated and frequent modern cyberattacks with robust email security that is easy to buy, deploy, and use.  

To give you an inside look at these updates and how they can benefit your organization, we sat down with Barracuda’s Olesia Klevchuk, Director of Product Marketing, Email Protection.

Q&A with Olesia Klevchuk, Director of Product Marketing, Email Protection

How do these updates and advancements help customers?

At Barracuda, we’re dedicated to providing solutions that are easy to buy, deploy, and use. Our latest enhancements to Barracuda Email Protection are a reflection of this commitment, making it even simpler for business to secure their email systems.

For example, our new email protection plans consolidate the essential layers of email security into one comprehensive solution without needing to pull together different solutions from different vendors, which makes life easier for customers and partners.

With our new inline deployment, we're also making it easy to deploy our solutions by offering customers flexibility with how they deploy email security, whether they want to deploy inline, use MX records, or leverage an API-based integration. We meet them where they are and provide the options that work for their business.

In addition, Barracuda Email Protection now monitors both internal and outbound email activity to detect early signs of phishing and suspicious behavior, which provides organizations with an additional layer of defense against account takeover. Analyzing all email traffic enables faster detection of potential threats, and we proactively alert administrators, empowering them to take instant action and neutralize risks before they escalate.

One of the most important steps in making email security easy to use is having the solution properly set up and configured. We understand that time and resources are very tight for many customers, and that's why we are offering free onboarding support to help customers get started and make sure their solutions are properly configured so they can start successfully protecting their businesses from day one.

Which advancements are you most excited about?

We’re really excited to introduce new flexible deployment options. We have traditionally offered customers the ability to deploy our email gateway through an MX records change and then supplement it with API-driven security, but now we’re also offering inline deployment without the need to switch over their MX records. It's an additional way to help our customers who do not want to make MX record changes. Offering more deployment options supports each organization’s unique needs, ensuring a smooth deployment that doesn’t disrupt their operations.

What sets Barracuda Email Protection apart?

Being easy to buy, deploy, and use is a core differentiator for Barracuda Email Protection. Customers work with us because we don't add constraints to their resources. We simplify those workflows, and they don't need to compromise on the level of security that they have.

Our customers are asking for solutions that don't require large teams to manage. At Barracuda, we’re committed to providing our customers access to the best security with the least amount of complexity.

How do you feel that the definition of essential email security has changed?

Traditionally, organizations have focused on preventing attacks from getting through, so they built firewalls and gateways along with various tools to identify and stop attacks. As the email threat landscape has evolved, some of more sophisticated attacks are getting through, and they’re putting a strain on organizations and their IT departments. So, businesses have started looking at ways to detect attacks post-delivery and identify any attacks that might have gotten through the walls and the gateways. Prevention and detection are no longer enough.

Organizations now need to have a way to respond to attacks quickly and automate the response to post-delivery threats — identifying those threats quickly, finding all impacted users, remediating those threats, and then analyzing the incident reports.

Email authentication is another area that's becoming very important. Over the past year, Google and Yahoo started implementing strict requirements for fully configured DMARC protocols. This makes email authentication protocols and email authentication tools a must have part of email security, not just to prevent threats from getting past security, but doing business in general.

Essential security is no longer just about identifying threats. It's also about responding to those threats with the least amount of resources and having email authentication tools in place to ensure that you have the right to send email and to protect your domains from being abused. And Barracuda is the only vendor that provides all of those things in the baseline plan.