Barracuda CloudGen WAF for AWS - BYOL

My main use case with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  is securing branch offices with remote users and hybrid environments while maintaining stable connectivity. I used it for firewall perimeter security and site-to-site VPN between offices and remote users' VPN access, as well as for intrusion prevention and web filtering, and SD-WAN for branch connectivity and traffic visibility and control.

I mainly use Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  for managing VPN users, monitoring branch office connectivity, and reviewing blocked traffic logs. I also handle web access control, IPS alerts review, and traffic prioritization.

The best feature of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is its SD-WAN capability because it helps optimize branch connectivity, along with strong VPN and multi-site connectivity. It is very useful for multiple offices and remote users. Traffic and bandwidth control are also important, especially when business applications need priority. Security services being in one platform includes firewall, IPS, filtering, and VPN. The hybrid cloud feature works well with mixed on-premises and cloud environments. To me, the most valuable feature is VPN and branch connectivity management because it offers secure access across multiple offices and remote user teams.

The VPN and branch connectivity management features make my work easier by connecting branch offices and the head office, along with cloud resources over time. For example, currently, one of my biggest clients has their head office in Bangalore and branch offices in Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune, with users working remotely from home. They share ERP  and a file server in the head office or Azure  cloud, so instead of using one internet access between the offices, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall creates an encrypted VPN tunnel between these locations, such as from the Mumbai office to the Bangalore office and Hyderabad office to Bangalore office. Remote  users connect securely to the computer network.

When branch offices face unstable internet connectivity and users complain that business applications are slow, I review the traffic through Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. I identified the bandwidth and heavy non-business traffic that affects critical applications. I also use traffic shaping policy control and prioritize business applications and VPN traffic, which improved performance quickly without requiring new hardware or extra internet service provider changes. The logs also help confirm the malicious traffic causing the issue.

Improvement areas for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall include addressing advanced setup complexity and needing in-depth documentation. Some advanced scenarios require clear examples, so they need to work more on documentation. Initial deployment also takes time, so if they address the initial deployment aspect, that advanced setup complexity would be another important area to improve.

I worked with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall for approximately one and a half years, mainly from a network security and branch connectivity perspective.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall offers very good stability.

Its scalability is high, making it suitable for SMB, mid-size businesses, and distributed branch connectivity environments.

The customer support for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is good. I would rate customer support at seven point five out of ten.

I previously used basic firewalls with separate VPN solutions before switching to Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

Initial deployment takes time, so if they address the initial deployment aspect, that advanced setup complexity would be another important area to improve.

For return on investment, if an organization has more than one office, they should consider this solution because it significantly improves branch productivity and reduces connectivity issues, providing strong, secure remote access. These are the main three points for return on investment that I have noticed.

Overall, the pricing for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is mid to premium depending on size, bandwidth, and security subscriptions.

Before choosing Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, I evaluated other options, including Fortinet FortiGate , SonicWall, Cisco Meraki, and WatchGuard Firebox .

I had one branch where users reported that application access was slow. I checked the traffic and found bandwidth overused by streaming traffic, applied policy control, and prioritized VPN and business application traffic. The users saw an improvement on the same day. Overall, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall helped us securely connect with branch offices and remote users through encrypted VPN tunnels while managing bandwidth and failover links to keep business applications stable.

Since I started using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, I have noticed stable branch connectivity, better secure remote access, and faster troubleshooting of network issues, along with reduced downtime for WAN issues and improved security visibility across offices. It provides better control of internet traffic. Regarding reduced downtime for WAN issues, it is around thirty to forty percent according to my experience.

For organizations considering Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, it is essential to evaluate not just firewall security but also WAN optimization and VPN experiences if they have multiple offices or remote users. Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a very practical choice for organizations requiring both security and reliable branch connectivity. It is very useful where networking and security teams need one platform. I give this solution a rating of eight out of ten.

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.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  SD-WAN capabilities have helped optimize our customers' bandwidth usage significantly because we are moving from MPLS to SD-WAN.

The most valuable features in Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  are the functionality of DPI and IDS, ATP, and we also use it in an SD-WAN operation as well, so it works well in the SD-WAN feature.

In terms of our routing and VPN capabilities, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall performs well.

The threat protection features of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall are good, and I appreciate their reporting capabilities. It is a very good tool to have, especially when you are using IDS and IPS to block SQL injection, buffer overflow attacks, and similar threats in real-time.

We use the cloud centralized management console for managing security policies.

There is room for improvement in terms of response time and first-level support quality.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall needs to learn from FortiManager and Palo Alto, as I see that they have automation and their reporting is easier to generate compared to Barracuda CloudGen Firewall.

I would like to see built-in endpoint integration in the next release of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, including EDR. They need to improve or at least have an AI-assisted traffic analyzer alert. Their support can be improved as well.

We have not had any issues while integrating Barracuda CloudGen Firewall with third-party solutions because the professional support was really helpful with the integration.

I rate the technical support by Barracuda a four out of ten.

The initial setup for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is quite easy.

The integration of Barracuda CloudGen Firewall with other products is good because we required assistance and professional help from the Barracuda team to come and help us, which was beneficial.

We have not had any issues while integrating Barracuda CloudGen Firewall with third-party solutions because the professional support was really helpful with the process.

The pricing for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is a bit pricey compared to Palo Alto or Fortinet.

My main use case for Barracuda CloudGen Firewall  is as a combined solution for application performance boost and secure SD-WAN, which I typically rely on to boost application performance by ensuring reliable connectivity to remote sites and users.

There are rush hours where traffic from cloud apps and off-network users increases and crowds the network. With Barracuda CloudGen Firewall , we are able to boost performance of crucial apps and high-priority projects in a very secure manner. This way, my top-priority ports do not experience downtimes.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall helps me boost application performance specifically by being capable of directly sending internet traffic with appropriate security inspection within no backhauls, whether it is SaaS or internet-bound traffic.

In my department, we have achieved consistent network link pooling and data caching optimization for both handling critical workloads, thereby saving a lot of work. There is always enough bandwidth for applications with Barracuda CloudGen Firewall optimization. We are, however, not completely satisfied with their link redundancy handling capabilities.

I use Barracuda CloudGen Firewall as a router and firewall in all of our organization globally, which is to terminate all management VPN tunnels to our organization and within the same country to avoid problems with long-distance internet connections.

The best features Barracuda CloudGen Firewall offers, in my experience, include its ability to scale dynamically, dispatch traffic to match workloads, utilize next-gen firewalls to assure data security, and provide great routing, firewall, and network management.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall's next-gen firewall capabilities increase the level of network protection against threats, visibility, and control of applications that users access. I also appreciate the URL filtering to block unauthorized or prohibited websites on the internal corporate network, protection against diverse malware at the edge of the network, and firewall redundancy with another backup appliance.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall has positively impacted my organization by increasing the level of network protection against threats from twenty percent to forty-five percent. It has enhanced visibility and control of applications that users access. It prevents cyberattacks and optimizes network and user management, making security more reliable over the past years.

I measured the improvement from twenty percent to forty-five percent based on fewer incidents of data breaches and also robust hardware that supports more than eighty thousand simultaneous connections, thereby being very stable.

To improve Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, it would be great to manage all firewalls in one pane of glass without charging more for this, get better push notifications, and also have better online documentation to make the learning curve much easier and smooth.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall still cannot combat link redundancy speedily. One time a network link failed, and it took a while before restoring traffic from the backup link, so this should be highly improved.

I chose an eight out of ten because Barracuda CloudGen Firewall cannot combat link redundancy speedily, while a ten rating is warranted as it has mainly boosted our application performance by ensuring reliable connectivity to remote sites and users.

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

In my experience, Barracuda CloudGen Firewall has been reliable and very high performing. I have not noticed any lagging or downtime.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall's scalability is great, as it can handle growth easily.

I have reached out to the customer support team a few times, and they have been very responsive and proactive.

I previously used a different solution called Smoothwall SWG.

I decided to switch from Smoothwall SWG to Barracuda CloudGen Firewall because Smoothwall SWG was more costly compared to Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, and it had many complicated features.

Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is very easy to set up and manage VPN connections, and it has great customization options.

It is very easy to manage Barracuda CloudGen Firewall. The dashboard allows us to configure all our need-to-see options, and the user interface is easily navigated and customized.

Since we started using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, security has greatly improved, which is a notable return on investment.

My experience with pricing is that while the licensing cost can be reduced and is somewhat costly, the price is good and affordable.

Before choosing Barracuda CloudGen Firewall, I evaluated other options, including Panda Adaptive Defense 360 .

My advice to others looking into using Barracuda CloudGen Firewall is that it is perfect for any size of organization to help remote workers connect seamlessly with the VPN product, boosting security and preventing data breaches, so the network is made stable. I gave this product a rating of eight out of ten.