Earlier this week we announced an expansion to Barracuda’s Cloud Ready program, which offers organizations a simple path for moving workloads and applications to the public cloud all while remaining secure. Security is one of the most common challenges businesses face during a cloud migration because legacy on-premises solutions typically aren’t fit to extend to the public cloud. And unfortunately, not being able to bridge the gap between current on-premises technologies and the public cloud could be a costly mistake — especially in an age where cyber criminals are looking for any and all vulnerabilities to exploit.
Along with the Cloud Ready program, we have put together a series of questions to help you determine if your current security vendors are up to the task of securing your applications, workloads, and data in the public cloud. You can find the full list of questions here.
And to provide a little more context on how these questions will help you determine if your current vendors are “cloud ready”, we’ll address the most pressing ones in this series — let’s start with number two and seven on the list:
2. Does the solution provide the same functionality in the public cloud as it does for on-premises deployments?
While cloud security might require less management than on-premises infrastructure, customers are still responsible for what they put in the cloud — meaning they will still need to monitor traffic and understand what’s going on in their cloud network to keep it secure. Sometimes it’s inevitable that a company will elect to deploy a cloud security solution from a different vendor than what is being used in their on-premises network because certain solutions aren’t well architected for the public cloud. The downside to this is that the customer is then faced with managing two separate tools in a hybrid environment (part cloud, part on-premises). However, some customers prefer to standardize with vendors who allow them to extend the same on-premises protection to a cloud deployment. Not only does this simplify management, but it’s a logical solution to a world where hybrid networks are likely to be the dominant architecture. This is the approach Barracuda has taken, where our NextGen Firewalls and Web Application Firewalls are virtually the same whether they are deployed on-premises or in the cloud.
7. Can the solution intelligently secure and optimize traffic between your on-premises and cloud networks in a hybrid environment?
The hybrid environment is expected to be the dominant architecture for the foreseeable future. This is because it takes time and planning to migrate on-premises workloads to the cloud, and because some of the older legacy solutions simply don’t lend themselves to the cloud. Additionally, most customers don’t start out in the cloud, but rather begin by moving on-premises applications and workloads there when the time is right for them. Barracuda’s Cloud Ready program helps simplify this by providing free 90-day licenses for both the Barracuda NextGen Firewall and Web Application Firewall. Because customers are responsible for securing what they put in the cloud, setting up their cloud security environment first makes it much easier to successfully leverage the cloud.
We hope this helps shed a little light on the importance of matching your on-premises functionality with what’s running in the cloud, and the possibility of optimizing traffic in a hybrid scenario. Please remember to stay tuned next week, as we’ll continue to address these questions throughout the series.
In the meantime, here are some resources to help you learn more about how Barracuda is helping customers address cloud security challenges.
Rich Turner – Rich is a Product Marketing Manager with Barracuda. He is currently leading Public Cloud marketing (AWS and Azure) where Barracuda has become Microsoft's #1 ISV and our revenues are growing at 400+%. His Barracuda blog is here.
Rich est directeur marketing pour les produits de cloud public chez Barracuda. Il a rejoint l'équipe dans le cadre de l'acquisition de C2C Systems en 2014. Rich est l'un des experts du cloud public de Barracuda. Il travaille directement sur les écosystèmes cloud et est cité dans des ebooks de Microsoft sur la sécurisation du cloud public. Il est également contributeur régulier des blogs thématiques sur le cloud de Barracuda. Dans le cadre de notre travail sur le cloud, il aide au développement de stratégies et à leur exécution avec nos partenaires et nos équipes commerciales.
Rich Turner – Rich is a Product Marketing Manager with Barracuda. He is currently leading Public Cloud marketing (AWS and Azure) where Barracuda has become Microsoft's #1 ISV and our revenues are growing at 400+%. His Barracuda blog is here.
