Barracuda Networks has introduced Release 8 of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. The new functionality helps streamline SD-WAN management, optimise cloud connectivity, and automate scalable protection across multi-cloud deployments.
Going through digital transformation, today’s organisations are moving to distributed work, cloud infrastructure and agile development. According to Gartner, “Customer demands for simplicity, scalability, flexibility, low latency and pervasive security force convergence of the WAN edge and network security markets, creating the secure access service edge (SASE), with a predominantly cloud-based, as-a-service delivery model.” 1
With Release 8 of the CloudGen Firewall, Barracuda has added a range of automation capabilities to streamline deployment and provide visibility and control for successful implementations.
“SD-WAN management can be complicated. Many SD-WAN products require days to deploy and can introduce vulnerabilities if not correctly configured,” said Klaus Gheri, VP of Network Security at Barracuda. “Barracuda CloudGen Firewall provides an all-in-one SD-WAN solution that’s integrated with public cloud infrastructure, providing organisations with the security and connectivity they need with automation that will make their lives easier.”
New functionality includes:
- Direct internet break-out optimisation — CloudGen Firewall now automatically selects the best available direct internet uplink for typical internet-hosted applications such as Dropbox and SalesForce.com. In the background, it monitors the available direct internet break-out and dynamically prioritises the best uplink based on current internet conditions.
- WAN Path Controller dashboard — Further extending the capabilities of Firewall Insights, this new dashboard dynamically displays the global SD-WAN data on network and remote location health status. This enables customers to achieve more efficient use of WAN resources while improving application performance.
- Automated integration with Azure vWAN — CloudGen Firewall now integrates to Azure vWAN with Central Management, Zero Touch Deployment, and support for Office 365 vWAN policies for optimised cloud application performance.
- Full lifecycle automation API — CloudGen Firewall now includes capabilities to provide network segmentation, security, and access control for automated deployment as part of agile cloud development processes. This helps customers to realise the full potential of their cloud migration initiatives.
- Auto VPN —CloudGen Firewall Release 8 brings VPN automation across multiple cloud providers, on-site, and virtual.
- Multi-gigabit performance — This CloudGen Firewall release can more than double network performance in the cloud over previous releases. This allows hosting and protecting even the most demanding workloads that require large amounts of bandwidth.
- Up to 50 percent improvement of VPN performance — Optimisation and modernisation of the underlying VPN engine now make use of the processing power provided by multi-core appliance and virtual hardware. This can result in up to 50 percent improvements of encrypted VPN throughput, even for deployed Barracuda CloudGen Firewall units.
“We are looking forward to the new CloudGen Firewall 8 functionality, as it simplifies SD-WAN management and optimises application performance with Direct Internet Breakouts,” said Michael Vormwald, Head of Network and Security at A1 Telekom Austria.
