CloudGen WAN includes personal remote access

Since Barracuda CloudGen WAN was introduced in July, customers and partners have praised the solution’s ease of use, as well as overall value.

“As we move our workloads to Microsoft Azure, we need to efficiently connect our sites to the cloud and optimise secure access to SaaS applications,” said Kaleb Mercer, Director of IT at Rödl & Partner USA, an integrated professional services firm of Rödl & Partner, with offices spread throughout the United States and servicing clients across the globe. “Barracuda CloudGen WAN is built natively on Azure, so it is easy to deploy and manage, which is what we need in our security solutions.”

"Barracuda CloudGen WAN offers value to companies of any size that have cloud-first priorities to move network infrastructure, routing, security, and remote access to the public cloud," said Tom Ricardo, Head of Cloud Strategy and Solutions at Vandis. "It combines the benefits of next-generation firewalls, secure SD-WAN, cloud integration and automation, and we look forward to using it to help our customers."

"We're hearing from a variety of customers that are looking for help getting secure access to the public cloud, and with Barracuda CloudGen WAN we can offer them a solution that's both easy to deploy and easy to manage," said Sean Canevaro, CEO at KIS.

“We are excited to see Barracuda offer the new SD-WAN service built natively on Azure,” said Chris Jump, Sales Director at SystemsUp Limited, a public cloud services provider based in the U.K. “As the market continues to move toward SaaS applications and secure cloud access, we look forward to working closely with Barracuda in this area.”

Based on early adopter customer feedback, Barracuda is also introducing two new CloudGen WAN devices for industrial endpoints, CloudGen WAN T93 and CloudGen WAN T193 with fibre connectivity. This extends the CloudGen WAN connectivity and security to industrial sites. These new CloudGen WAN devices are available immediately. 

In addition, Barracuda CloudGen WAN will include cloud-delivered personal remote access functionality. This overcomes the limitations of traditional VPN and eliminates the implicit trust model deployed by traditional point-to-site solutions, simplifying management and mitigating cyber risks as enterprises embrace increased workforce mobility.

With the new personal remote access functionality, remote users will be able to connect directly to CloudGen WAN gateways that run inside Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN Hubs. Users can authenticate via Microsoft Azure Active Directory, utilising multi-factor authentication. User-to-application policies are automatically enforced by CloudGen WAN, replacing implicit trust of traditional VPN solutions. Each user is only granted access to their authorised applications, and the CloudGen WAN service enforces these rules on all gateways and sites globally.

This functionality ensures that only authorised users can access specific applications based on an organisation’s security policy. Access is granted on a need-to-know, least-privileged basis and controlled by granular policies. A software-defined perimeter is created where authorised users are given access only to specific applications instead of access to the entire network. The result is reduced risk to the network, to applications, and ultimately to the business.

According to Gartner: “Excessive implicit network trust creates excessive latent risk that will be attacked. Network access (even the right to ‘ping’ or see a server or application) is not a given. It should be earned based on the identity of the user, the device and context.”

“Adding personal remote access to CloudGen WAN provides another key piece as we build out an increasingly robust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) offering,” said Tim Jefferson, SVP of Data, Network and Application Security, Engineering, at Barracuda. “We are pleased to see the excitement and interest from customers and partners looking to this solution to address this SD-WAN and security needs.”

In a July blog post about running SD-WAN virtual appliances natively in Azure Virtual WAN, Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President, Azure Networking at Microsoft wrote: “Barracuda is the first Virtual WAN partner to bring the advantage of this deep integration allowing customers to take advantage of SD-WAN (Software-Defined Wide Area Network) to improve performance while taking advantage of existing investments and skills.”

Barracuda CloudGen WAN has been generally available since July 2020. The new cloud-delivered personal remote access functionality will be available later this year.