Episode Transcript
[00:00:20] Speaker A: Hi there, I'm Stephen Lester, partner business manager at Insight and I'm delighted today to be joined by Darren Sharp from Microsoft and Rob Butterworth from Barracuda. Would you like to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit more about you?
[00:00:33] Speaker B: Yeah. Hi there, I'm Rob Butterworth, I'm solutions architect at Barracuda, been here for a number of years now working around the network protection and application protection parts of our portfolio. That means naturally we're going to be spreading into the likes of Azure as well as the on prem world as well. But yeah, really exciting times with all these cloud delivered services that we're working with now.
[00:00:57] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:00:58] Speaker C: My name is Darren Sharp and I'm the commercial marketplace lead at Microsoft for our UK Channel partners that are using the Azure Marketplace as a mechanism of delivering transformation. And that's very much about these multi party private offers where Insight can be the trusted advisor for your customers, for our joint customers. Delivering Barracuda's solution in this really elastic way that I'm excited to be able to talk to you about today.
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Fantastic.
Would you also be able to tell us a little bit more about Barracuda's partnership with Insight and Microsoft and how long that's been going on and what you've been up to?
[00:01:39] Speaker C: I guess, look, Barracuda is integral to both our partnerships, isn't it, really?
But let me be very clear from this perspective here, it's absolutely about built in Azure and that assured solution that this is part of the Azure portfolio and using that Azure tech stack and that's the power of the partnership. Because what we're able to do here is use that platform to give that assured architecture and to together deliver the best in class technology from Barracuda in the cloud. And now with this multi party private offer process in the Azure Marketplace, that's Insight first. That's for you to be able to deliver that real value, that real technological best practice with the marketplaces being that mechanism of delivery. So it couldn't be a better time to deliver this integrated technology portfolio with the best in class value characteristics around those solutions.
[00:02:45] Speaker A: I think it's fair to say there are quite a few of our clients out there who may incorrectly assume that the Azure Marketplace is only for the big corporations out there. What would you say to them?
[00:02:57] Speaker C: It's a common misnomer. I'll say this. Over 40% of Cloud Marketplace users are SMB.
Absolutely.
And I think, look, we're here to talk today about, you know, the fantastic technology partner that we've both got In Barracuda, if I take an aside just for a second, you've got a world of digital natives and some of those complementary ISV solutions that maybe fit, you know, in the very sides of an agile infrastructure. They're not necessarily the best in class, you know, top 1015 enterprise architecture solutions like Barracuda, but you've got those up and coming digital natives that are very complementary that are in the technology ecosystem. They're only going to be available in a cloud marketplace they're building with Microsoft first and they're starting with a cloud marketplace as a route to market and then they want our Microsoft partners and Insight as a multi party private offer partner can help work to bring those solutions all together.
[00:04:02] Speaker A: And a lot of these digital natives, as you say, won't know any better. They've been brought up that way. That's how they buy everything through app.
[00:04:08] Speaker C: Stores and yeah, I mean, look, I'm pleased to say you're welcome your comment in a minute. But you know, Barracuda, I'm all about channel. This is absolutely about channel Barracuda 100% channel organization. Those digital natives don't have channels, but they recognize the fact that you, Stephen, is the channel partner here, you're the ecosystem Advisor. Those top 100 SaaS, organizations that only maybe have 10 to 20% channel source business, they're looking to work with channels and they're looking to work with Microsoft channels and that's Insight.
[00:04:39] Speaker A: Perfect, thank you. Rob, would you have to tell us a little bit more about what Barracuda solutions are currently available on the Azure Marketplace?
[00:04:47] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. So we've got a number of our solutions are kind of built in Azure. So we have data protection, for example, in there, the likes of our cloud backup for 365, we have application protection for the likes of our WAFS. So web application firewalls, which is definitely a hot topic at the moment, especially with our sassified version of that WAF as a service as well, and then network protection. So firewalls, firewalls for people's Azure environments, how do people connect to it with SD wan0 trust? These are all sort of hot topics really. And we've operated with Microsoft for years already since there has been a marketplace. We've recognized that we need our technology in there to help protect people's journey there. But I would say probably traditionally it's been maybe more enterprise that we've had when it's been deploying WAFs and firewalls, but really recently we've seen a big uptake from SMEs, any kind of sector, it doesn't really matter. With the introduction of SaaS products, it's made it so that they can consume that much easier. And then from a marketplace as well, and working with partners such as yourselves, it just means that kind of procurement journey is much easier too. And they're not having to worry about how do we get all this deployed. We can just start building our stuff in it, we can start protecting our things.
So yeah, I'd say that is.
It's been a big drive for us.
[00:06:24] Speaker A: Do you think the big game change has been that as a service model, I mean it seems almost everything it wise these days is available as a service, but I suppose that allows clients to scale no matter what their size.
[00:06:36] Speaker B: Yeah, this is it. It's like, you know, there's definitely still a demand for appliances as infrastructure and whatnot, but as a service, it's that shared responsibility model. The, the customers are not having to worry about scale, as you say, and also patching up time, all these sorts of things and having to keep that fabric running underneath it. They can just, yeah, they can configure the settings and things they need to within the app. I think 365 was the biggest thing that showed people this is the future and this is the way people want to consume stuff. And now they just want it with everything basically. And it's up to companies like ourselves to make sure our solutions are available in that SaaS model as well.
[00:07:20] Speaker A: Fantastic. Could you give me some examples of how the marketplace is being used, what impact that's had for Barracuda since transactions started going through it rather than traditional channel model?
[00:07:33] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean I think there's a lot of kind of examples, but if we probably just focus on the hottest.
[00:07:40] Speaker A: A couple of case studies or a couple of topics.
[00:07:43] Speaker B: So I think, well, certainly it's meant that the cycle of people better to pick things up and run with it has been much quicker.
And you know, as you've said before, people, there's a lot of businesses we work with now who wouldn't have necessarily had a channel before. So it's given us exposure to them, means we can help work with those and protect those.
But if I think if we look at the network protection side of it, there's a zero trust side to that. I mean we've got a platform called Secure Edge, which is a SASE platform and that started its life in Azure, was the first part of it a global SD WAN service built on Azure. But then we've been Adding bits to that, like our zero trust and things. And there's a couple of really interesting use cases for that, both at different ends of the scales, one of them being the SD WAN part of it, because it is modular, so people can just take, well, we need this for SD wan, but maybe down the road we might need some hybrid workers and things so you can add to it. So one of those was SD wan. For a large metropolitan city in the uk, they had a CCTV refresh that they needed to do all 4K cameras. So lots and lots of data. They had a very old analog kind of Internet connectivity, or not even an Internet, you know, old CCTV system. And they were talking about hundreds of cameras and they wanted to get it all streaming to Azure and they didn't want to be tied into the same ISPs and things. They wanted that autonomy and flexibility that SD WAN gives them.
So that was one of the things we were able to deliver, was the fact that they could deploy this cloud, manage it, have a platform that's running in Azure, given them the connectivity into the video records and stuff they've already got there. But better to manage it with the same team who were always managing that old MPLS circuit and things with their Internet service provider, not growing the team. So you need it to be simple enough that they can do that, but give them the technology so they can plug whatever Internet lines they want into this and overlay it and then have that connectivity.
And the thing that I think is coolest about this one is the fact that the person that was going around installing these SD WAN boxes and all the camera posts in the street, which no doubt you would have walked past, that was the CCTV engineer that was plugging the camera in. They didn't have to send, you know, technical firewall people to go and install this. It was the guy who was plugging the cables in for the cctv, he was able to plug our box in at the same time and, you know, 10 minutes later it's connected to Azure.
[00:10:20] Speaker A: So in terms of ease of use and autonomy, as you say, a real game changer for that client. For those who don't really know, perhaps you can explain a little bit more about what Secure Edge WAF as a service and SASE are, because there might be a few people out there who Terminology overload.
[00:10:39] Speaker B: Yeah, so SASE is kind of really the new kid on the block from the acronyms perspective, but it's really a culmination of a few different technologies and it is about those technologies all Being cloud delivered and managed from ideally as few places as possible. So a single pane of glasses if we're going to invert a commas. But SD WAN is about secure connectivity of branches, places to data centers, for example Azure in this case, but giving them the flexibility to bring their own Internet circuits to that.
The Zero Trust part of the SASE is the secure hybrid workers. So coffee shop workers work in an office, pick your laptop up, take it to a coffee shop, take it to home and have the same security policies applied and the same level of access to things without compromising corporate data. You know, giving access to things for contractors for example as well. And bring your own device. These are all new concepts really that just businesses wouldn't be able to think about before, but now you can deliver with Zero Trust technology instead of regular VPNs and you know, web filtering and things are part of this, part of this as well and making sure there's firewalling everywhere. So that's kind of that side and I guess there's another use case there as well, which probably the Zero trust side a bit.
Again this was in Azure and they came to us needing a solution really to provide secure remote access because they were merging two businesses together and they were a law firm and they had so many different VPN solutions, so many different remote access solutions at the time they were merging, they wanted to centralize stuff, move it to Azure. They needed a way of doing that. And moving to a new single zero trust solution was what enabled them to do that. So they deployed that. And this was a game changer. They said that this allowed them to do 18 months worth of work in six months with migrating to Azure, which was fantastic. And then now they're there, they're looking at site devices for protecting their offices, firewalls and things. They can just bolt that on. And that is probably in a nutshell what Secure Edge is. You're in there with a cloud delivered zero trust solution, but you can bolt on these other bits down the line and it's like no work to do that.
[00:13:03] Speaker A: Fantastic.
[00:13:04] Speaker B: So another use case that we have or we've seen a big growth of in Azure is the WAF as a service part as well. Cause traditionally I think it's fair to say our WAF customer base. So web application firewalls, it's all about protecting people's web facing applications. So websites, mobile apps, APIs, all these different things, making sure those are protected. Our customer there was typically the enterprise because they had the people with the skills to manage that so some of our largest companies there are like your credit card companies and banks and things. But WAF as a service, the goal was always to make it so even the smallest of business could protect their website with this technology, but not need the skillset to do it. So we had to make it simpler, but we had to take away that management layer of it as well. So building in Azure was key to us because of the scalability also enabling us to do this globally. We can just pop up in a new country anywhere where there's a data center that's run by Microsoft. We can pop this service up there and we built it in a modern way so that it's using all the tools that we could that are available to us in Azure as well, so that it can scale up and scale down. Because remember, some of these customers will be in retail where they'll have Black Friday and things and they will get sudden massive amount of demand on their applications. And we can't be the weak link here. So making sure that it can scale up, scale up. If there's a large cyber attack as well, if there's a big distributed denial of service where people are attacking it from all angles from all around the world, between our technology and the massive network that Microsoft have, it means we can protect against that as well.
One of the nice use cases that I always remember on this is we had this quite small private opticians that came to us saying, can you help? We've just Googled web application protection or DDoS protection, something like that, and our name came up on the list. So they clicked on the website and they got in touch and they said, our website keeps going down our customer portal. Our customers can't get on there to change bookings and check when their appointment is and things.
And we just couldn't figure out why. Then we've just suddenly had this email in our inbox from somebody saying, hey, we're attacking.
It's ransom. But it was the first time I'd seen it a year or so. Again, as a denial of service for ransom. Normally they encrypt your files and things like that. This was a we're just going to keep taking it down until you pay us some money. Naturally we thought, well, we'd rather pay for some security or whatever, or what can we do there?
Because this is built in Azure and it's all automated. We could deploy them, a trial within about 20 minutes in front of their website and we could scrub off that traffic straight away. They were instantly able to see the value of that and they were able to make their website come up and you know, they were kind of looking, well, how many hits are we getting and how bad was this? And we were seeing like nearly a million hits a second.
[00:16:15] Speaker A: Well, I mean there's always this misconception, isn't there, that DDoS attacks and things like that, they're only going to go after the big boys because they want the big money. But I suppose if you're the type of person who's into extorting money or in this manner, if you attack 100 small businesses who aren't liable to have the protection to start with, you're more likely to get a success if you're asking for smaller amounts. So I think people think they're immune because they are only an SMB when in fact they might be the prime target.
[00:16:42] Speaker B: Precisely. And that's why we, you know, our goal is to make, you know, scalable solutions that are easy to manage and you know, and that are, you know, easy to procure and easy to get installed as well. And that's again why it's a great partnership working with partners such as yourself and Microsoft as well in the Marketplace. Deliver those.
[00:17:01] Speaker A: So Darren, we can just move over to you. If some one of our clients watching this wants to procure Barracuda solutions through the Azure marketplace, how would they go about it and how would they find out more?
[00:17:12] Speaker C: What a great question. I mean the honest answer is come to Insight.
The marketplace now supports these multiparty private offers, I'm pleased to say Insight are a multiparty private offer partner or MPO partner. What that means is through your certifications, accreditations with Barracuda, you can deliver all this great technology that Rob's talking about with the elasticity of the marketplace and you can offer your customers that same great value, that same great pricing structure, any custom terms, all that kind of channel partner value around the ecosystem advisory is done through Insight. So customer can receive these offers within their Azure portal and it can be with all that value wrap. So to answer the question directly, it's common. Talk to Insight to us about how to do this.
Get that first private offer into your Azure portal, receive the value and start to receive all the great features that Rob's talked about. It's channel first, insight first, but Marketplace delivered.
[00:18:23] Speaker A: It sounds to me that there's plenty of scope for solutions out there around SASE WAF as a service.
Zero trust environments no matter what size of business. So I'd like to thank Darren and I'd like to thank Rob for their time today, joining us here at Insight. If you want to talk more around any of these solutions you've heard about today, please don't hesitate to reach out to your Insight representative.
I've been Stephen Lester. I thank you for viewing and thank you for your time. Have a wonderful day. Goodbye.
