Demand for cloud data protection “snuck up on us”: Barracuda exec

Customer demand for cloud-hosted file storage and related services has grown so rapidly that they have surpassed Barracuda Networks' core security business to become the company's most significant source of new business, according to a senior company executive.

“We're generally known as a security company and have a pretty broad security portfolio that we're proud of,” senior vice president of worldwide sales Michael Hughes told CSO Australia during a recent visit.

“But data protection is now a bigger business for us. It has snuck up on us, and become a very significant business and one that we continue to invest in.”

Those investments have seen Barracuda bolstering its cloud data-management services, which range from things like e-discovery and email file management to data backup, archiving, and file synchronisation and sharing.

Those services – which have been assembled over time through the acquisition of small companies and the launch of services like Copy, its Dropbox competitor – have proved appealing to customers because they have come to provide seamless and scalable storage for companies that need and value flexibility in their requirements.

“We're doing a bunch of things that we hadn't really been doing in archiving, but that customers were increasingly asking for,” Hughes explained. “We're protecting all of their files – not just email.”

Reflecting the company's broader scope of services and its broader engagement with customers, Barracuda recently wrapped its services under a banner offering called Data Protection Plus, which bundles its various offering into service packs focused around availability, accessibility, mobility, and productivity.

Growth has been so strong in Australia that Barracuda recently fast-tracked an upgrade of its local data-handling capabilities, using new capacity to deliver cloud-storage capabilities that address the data sovereignty concerns that have historically kept many organisations away from cloud services.

“For files that are regularly accessed, we can store them based on the frequency of usage – and we can provide higher performance because data is stored locally,” he explained.

“Companies are starting to expand their usage: we've seen some pretty significant deals in size and frequency of customer acquisition. And I think, with the uniqueness of the services we will start to see a new set of people engaged with us.”

This article is brought to you by Enex TestLab, content directors for CSO Australia.