Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for AWS - PAYG

I use Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  for multiple functionalities. One function is an email security gateway. It also acts for network security protection, network security and threat protection, which includes IPS concepts, malware protections, zero-day threat detections, web filtering and URL categorization and application controller. Additionally, it works for secure remote access through VPN, and SD-WAN for multi-site connectivity, which provides intelligent traffic routing and optimization. There is a possibility of cloud integration as well. It also includes web application firewall capabilities, which takes care of web application security and provides email security services. However, this should be tied up with the email security gateway to the firewall because Barracuda has a separate product for email security gateway, which needs to be integrated with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall . Then, this use case would work.

I use Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for multiple functionalities including email security gateway, network security, threat protection, IPS concepts, malware protections, zero-day threat detections, web filtering, URL categorization, application controller, secure remote access through VPN, SD-WAN for site connectivity, intelligent traffic routing, and cloud integration. Additionally, it includes web application firewall features and allows email security, requiring integration with a separate email security gateway product.

When I consider what I dislike about Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, there are a lot of competitors in the market. Next-gen firewalls offer a lot of capabilities. From a capability standpoint, competitors would allow you to configure use cases according to your needs and improvements. However, when I worked on Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, the option towards configuring the use cases was quite limited. The second point that I would highlight is the integration towards data points. The integration towards monitoring devices was quite complicated comparatively to other devices. Other vendors were mostly plug and play technology, but with respect to Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, we needed to involve a lot of manual effort in terms of those integrations.

I have been using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for almost four to five years.

These kinds of stability issues happen in every tool. I will not blame or degrade Barracuda CloudGen Firewall in any means. The reason is that it was stable for us for a longer period of time. The support they provide during critical phases, such as the deployment of patches and other tasks, was adequate. During the deployment of patches and considering the uptime after the deployment of patches, the downtime and uptime are quite manageable for critical operations. They were on par on that stability portion.

I think Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is good from a scalable standpoint. From a rating standpoint, I would give it an eight.

I do get a lot of use cases to contact the technical support. One is starting from the integration standpoint and starting from the initial deployment standpoint. The deployment strategy was quite complicated considering the nature of deployment strategy that we have chosen. During the integration phases, we do contact their technical support.

I'll rate the technical support at an average of seven. The reason is they are good at certain phases of the support, and not at certain phases of the support. When I say certain phases of the support, when you are buying the product and when you are deploying at the initial phase, they are quite supportive because they wanted to establish their mark in the organization. But once everything is done and once when we are trying to configure the use cases or probably the integration phase with other tools, the support we expect at that phase of the project is not bad, but quite average. There might be a lot of reasons behind it as well. I do understand that because the kind of customer service that we would have adopted, there are a lot of customer service options available, such as gold or silver. Probably the option that we have chosen as an organization might not be better. I am not sure. But during the integration phase, I would say it is quite average. On a scale of ten, I rate it seven.

The initial deployment strategy of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall was easy. They offer two kinds of deployment strategies. One is an on-premises solution, and the other one is a cloud-based deployment solution. Both offerings were good. We took the options that were viable and that suited our needs. They provided multiple options in terms of the deployment. Additionally, they offer a kind of tech specialist in terms of supporting your deployment, which eases the job from an organization standpoint and in terms of writing the use cases. The deployment strategy was adequate.

I have used Fortinet Firewall as a competitor. Fortinet was a different product with its own pros and cons. From an integration standpoint, when all these data points are more important in this current world, the only concern that I would note from Barracuda CloudGen Firewall standpoint is that during the integration standpoint, it was difficult for us to integrate with other monitoring tools in which we would monitor the events in a single centralized repository. The alternative option that we were using was Fortinet, but we stuck with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall due to its intelligence in terms of blocking the anomaly traffics and other capabilities.

Maintenance is a common aspect of any product in which you maintain it on a regular basis irrespective of a patch update or anything. It is quite mandatory. Since the market is dynamic and due to evolving threats around the world, every vendor or every organization would be choosing a product based on the threat landscape and what is the threat for our suppliers. Barracuda is one of the suppliers for us. We need to stay on top of the threat and make sure that the maintenance is happening. Even if the product has reached the end of life, we need to understand till how much time that the particular product would get support from the vendor standpoint. If it is not, what is the other alternate option in terms of upgrading the product itself. Maintenance is a kind of bread and butter for every organization to take care of. My overall review rating for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is seven out of ten.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  is for cloud security because cloud service providers like Azure , AWS , and GCP  provide interfaces where organizations need to install different firewalls to secure their infrastructure. The normal security gateway or three-layer firewall they offer is not sufficient to control current threats. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  can protect infrastructure from Layer 7 aspects.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is designed for organizations with multiple branches and hybrid cloud environments. It provides strong SD-WAN capabilities including intelligent routing, failover, and link optimization. For example, if a company has offices in different locations such as Pune, Bangalore, and the US, and the MPLS link fails, the firewall automatically switches traffic to broadband without any downtime. Additionally, connecting AWS  VPC to on-premises networks is straightforward and secure.

The support for distributed and hybrid environments is the best aspect I appreciate about Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. It provides strong SD-WAN capabilities including intelligent routing, failover, and link optimization. If a company has offices in different locations such as Pune, Bangalore, and the US, and the MPLS link fails, the firewall automatically switches traffic to broadband without any downtime. Connecting AWS VPC to on-premises networks is straightforward and secure.

Another valuable feature is easy centralized management. From one single console, I can manage multiple firewall policies, rules, and updates very easily. From a security coverage perspective, it provides good security coverage including firewalling, IPS, VPN, web filtering, and malware protection. The most important aspect is that while enabling these features, it works in real life and functions very well according to the defined policy.

For mid-size and small-size organizations, a cost-effective solution is the fourth and most important point. If I were to buy a similar solution from competitors such as Palo Alto, Cisco, or Check Point , they offer this solution at a higher cost. Where cost is a concern for an organization, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a good choice.

Strong hybrid SD-WAN capabilities are the best feature I have seen. The availability has increased significantly due to good SD-WAN capabilities that bring features including intelligent routing, failover, and link optimization. If anything fails in a disaster scenario, the failover is very smooth, so the end user will not realize what exactly happened at the perimeter. Additionally, good link optimization capabilities improve user experience when accessing different public resources. Since we are moving from browser segments to application segments, a good strong link is necessary. From that perspective, it is very much easier to configure link optimization and user experience is excellent.

From a user interface perspective, I do not see that much cleanliness compared with other vendors such as Palo Alto and Check Point . While creating policies, some settings are hidden inside multiple menus, which makes it slightly confusing, and a person who has never used Barracuda CloudGen Firewall may need some time to learn that. The user interface and learning curve need to be more simple.

From an advanced threat perspective, AI-driven detection and deep endpoint integration may need some more improvement. Nowadays, to enable advanced threat protection, organizations may require some additional tools for complete protection. That is another improvement area.

From a performance and scaling perspective, I have seen that performance can be impacted when all security features are enabled. That is why I recommend that this solution is not ideal for enterprise-grade environments or organizations. Additionally, from an ecosystem and integration point of view, there is a smaller ecosystem compared to leading firewall vendors. Integration with third-party tools requires additional efforts. For example, integration with SIEM  tools such as Splunk works but needs some manual setup. These are the improvement areas for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall in my view.

Nowadays, AI is everywhere, and every solution infuses AI for product portfolio enhancement. However, when we infuse AI, we need to take care of other aspects as well because AI can help us enhance our cybersecurity posture, but at the same time, it can be a nightmare that brings attackers. We need to use caution while enabling any AI-driven features. From an overall rating perspective, I would say it is medium. I do not see anything exceptional with the AI.

I have used Barracuda CloudGen Firewall since my TCS  days, and I have been using it for almost four to five years.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a stable solution. I have not experienced any crashes or downtime. However, when all features are enabled, there are some performance spikes that occur.

I can handle growth and larger workloads easily with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. I do not see any problem with the scalability aspect.

From a customer support perspective, I would rate it at eight. The knowledge base is also good. Whenever I faced any issues and searched the knowledge base, I found many solutions in place.

I have not switched from anything, as I work with various products in my portfolio. I have worked with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, Fortinet, and Palo Alto, so I have worked with all these leading vendors. As required, I need to work with different vendor solutions. For me, it is about the technology and the firewall. The vendor may be different, and based on the project, I need to work on different tools.

From a money saved perspective, it is almost more than fifty percent money saved. Due to its feature set, the user experience also improved by around fifteen to twenty percent.

Although I am not directly involved in that particular segment, from what I understood from the pricing information, it is a very cost-effective solution compared with other well-known firewall vendors that are in the market.

I evaluated Fortinet and Palo Alto as solutions.

From a user interface perspective, I do not see that much cleanliness compared with other vendors such as Palo Alto and Check Point. While creating policies, some settings are hidden inside multiple menus, which makes it slightly confusing, and a person who has never used Barracuda CloudGen Firewall may need some time to learn that. My advice to others looking into using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is that if an organization is mid-size or small-size, it can easily use Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. However, if it is a large or enterprise organization, you must think it through. If an organization is moving into the cloud and has a smaller footprint, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall can be used because in the cloud, organizations are getting a clean pipe solution. It is easy to use it in a cloud environment with minimal application solutions. My overall rating for this product is six.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  is used to protect data in two data centers, including headquarters and data center H5O.

I am using calls functionality from DLP  forwarding calls and SSL inspection in Barracuda CloudGen Firewall , and all of those are necessary to be used. I cannot qualify which is more important than others, but it is a complete product, and I am using all features.

I don't know about the centralized management console for managing policies in Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. We are not using it, and I don't know what that is. My vendor didn't provide me information about such a feature.

There are a lot of functionalities already present, but the problem is whether there is knowledge about the functionalities or stability.

Barracuda can make improvements for the next generation firewall product. In general, it is a very rare product in our market. More training and more learning for customers on how to use these products are needed. We are suffering from a lack of engineers in our market, so I am considering changing the product to a more popular one because it is not easy to recommend Barracuda, even this great product, but nobody uses it in Poland, and it is not easy to do anything. I know just one company which is supporting us.

Concerning the effectiveness of the filtering capabilities in Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, it happens sometimes that the classifications are misleading with wrong categorizations of what they use into the games or something into categories when it is definitely not in the category. I don't know from what reasons, but maybe it could be adjusted.

I have been working with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall since 2016 in one location, and in the second one, it has been three years.

For stability, I would rate the next generation firewall stability of the product an eight.

Regarding scalability and the ability to scale and expand with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, there is no issue, so I would rate it a ten.

I would rate the technical support for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall a six, as in the past, it was definitely better, but recently it has not been as good.

I compared Barracuda CloudGen Firewall mainly with FortiGate.

For the initial setup of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, it was a bit more complex than simple; I would rate it at six on a scale from one to ten.

I used a third-party company for the integration and setup of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. I have some knowledge about the product and in-house capability, but I am relying on the third-party company for the purposes of integrations and new products.

The key reason I chose Barracuda over FortiGate is that I have been using Barracuda since 2016 or even 2015, and I am just used to it. It is stable, it is working, and there are no issues. However, to develop and use new features, I am lacking specialists, which is why it is not easy to expand with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

I do not use the SD WAN  capabilities of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

Threat protection feature in Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is working. I have not had much experience with other products, so I didn't support any issues with that module. It is working just fine.

I was a long-time strong fan of this product, but unfortunately, I will change the vendor for another one. Therefore, I cannot recommend it. If someone can set up things in-house with specialists, then it is quite a good product. There are not so many critical incidents, but probably mostly because it is not so popular. The pain point for me is support. In general, with a small scale, I was able to manage it myself, but with a wider scale, it is not possible to rely on in-house specialists, and there is no specialist available on the market. I would give this review an overall rating of seven.