5. Ride The Microsoft Relationship

Barracuda started on its journey with Microsoft more than seven years ago and was the first company to have a web application firewall (WAF) and a next-generation firewall in Azure thanks to its support of distributed environments, Jenkins said. The company’s experience with distributed networks taught it how to manage thousands of connection points and keep them secure without overspending, he said.

When it comes to connectivity, Jenkins said telcos and MPLS suffer from higher prices and connectivity restrictions while other SD-WAN offerings are hard to configure and difficult to manage due to their lack of native integration with the public cloud, Jenkins said. But Barracuda’s SD-WAN tool is as close as you can get to a native Microsoft offering, and capitalizes on the stability and reliability of the public cloud.

Barracuda’s integration of CloudGen WAN into Microsoft Azure means that customers can enjoy secure connectivity, management and orchestration, giving the company a huge advantage over peers. Jenkins said the company’s offering is simple to deploy, easy to order and can be managed as a service, while other SD-WAN tools have components deployed in different places and require lots of manual tinkering.