West Chester CISO stays ahead of threats with Barracuda

How Barracuda became the go-to security vendor for a Pennsylvania borough

Takeaways

• The Borough of West Chester turned to Barracuda  for help addressing their evolving cybersecurity needs.
• Initial success with a single Barracuda product quickly grew into a widespread rollout across all of West Chester’s municipal infrastructure.
• Barracuda stood out because of its simplicity, reliability and responsive support.
• BarracudaONE lets the CISO easily manage and view all Barracuda solutions from one unified interface.

I don’t want to get in trouble for saying this, but based on the evidence, it really does look as though Barracuda is addictive. (See how the Borough of West Chester got hooked, in this case study.)

The pattern is clear. Someone buys a single Barracuda solution because it meets a specific need of theirs.

Once they’ve tried it, they’re hooked. The simplicity, the reliability, the responsive support — it just feels great, which is pretty rare among technology vendors. And so the next time they’re considering a security investment, the first thing they ask their reseller or MSP is “What’s Barracuda got?”

Sometimes they won’t even bother to evaluate competing solutions. I’m not endorsing that as a process, but it does happen.

West Chester gets hooked

The Borough of West Chester, in Pennsylvania, and its CISO Bill Mann, are a case in point. Bill takes security very seriously, and he understands that threats keep evolving, requiring constant vigilance and frequent improvements to security. To see all the details of Bill’s decade-plus journey with Barracuda, get the full case study now.

West Chester has the normal amount of infrastructure for a borough of nearly 19,000 population. Government offices, parking garages, wastewater treatment plants. And they’ve got 15 police cruisers, not to mention some employees who work in the field. Even before he was promoted to CISO, Bill saw the need to securely connect all these facilities and people to the network.

Bill and his team looked at multiple offerings, including from Fortinet and Cisco.

“But the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall just won out on value. For the price, and the capabilities we needed, it was the best match for us. We connected all the infrastructure with firewall appliances using the TINA VPN protocol, and it’s been great for us.”

— Bill Mann, CISO, Borough of West Chester, PA

Coming back for more

Bill calls himself an early adopter. Usually that works out well. (But not always. You can read about a classic early-adoption mistake he once made in the case study.)

In 2009, when it came time to spend a bundle on a new Exchange server, he decided to instead migrate to Microsoft Online, now known as Microsoft 365. The move made West Chester one of the first government entities to make the leap to the cloud.

And what did he do for security in that new environment?

“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

As threats evolved, so did Bill’s security.

“Once phishing and impersonation became a big issue, we went back to Barracuda and added on more services, and now we have the complete Barracuda Email Protection platform.”

— Bill Mann

BarracudaONE for simplicity

The BarracudaONE platform architecture makes it incredibly simple to manage and gain visibility across all of Bill’s Barracuda solutions and capabilities through a single, unified interface.

“BarracudaONE saves us lots of time. …  I can easily access every part of my security infrastructure through a single portal, without any hardware to manage except our firewalls. That’s a huge benefit of having a single, reliable vendor for integrated security.”

— Bill Mann

Get all the details of Bill’s story about securing the Borough of West Chester, in the full case study. See how he uses BarracudaONE to simplify not just email security but also firewall management, archiving, backup, domain protection, web security, and DLP.