Barracuda Essentials for Microsoft Office 365
by Kate Smith, Director, Sales & Marketing
Barracuda Networks recently rolled out a complimentary product for Microsoft’s Office 365 licensing called Barracuda Essentials for Office 365. As a Microsoft Cloud Partner as well as a Barracuda Partner, we were very excited to learn more about this offering as well as position it to our customer base. Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 provides multi-layer security for email threat protection, archiving for compliance, and backup and recovery for Office 365 SKUs.
So before we delve into the nitty gritty of what is included with Barracuda Essentials for Office 365, it’s important to understand the distinction between what Microsoft includes with Office 365 and how Barracuda compliments Office 365 with their Essentials package. A quick check on the Microsoft Office 365 website confirms that specific SKUs do include Exchange Online Protection and Compliance Center. However, according to Barracuda, “many companies that have significant volume of email realize email security included with Office 365 can be hard to manage and lacks granular controls.” (Barracuda Networks, 2016) Additionally, Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 adds “important email retention, archiving and eDiscovery capabilities. Many companies find email preservation in Office 365 is basic and doesn’t meet the needs of organizations facing any type of regulations or legal challenges.” (Barracuda Networks, 2016)
Lastly, Barracuda points out, “it is never prudent to keep all of your emails in a single database with no backup or disaster recovery plan. Unfortunately, companies often realize too late that data can be lost due to user errors, corrupted file attachments and other problems outside the Microsoft cloud. Barracuda Essentials provides cloud-to-cloud backup of your emails and files to the Barracuda Cloud, OneDrive for Business or even to an on-premises server.” (Barracuda Networks, 2016)
Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 contains three major value-adds to Office 365:
Comprehensive Email Threat Protection provides greater blocking and protection from malware, viruses and phishing delivered via email.
Archiving for Compliance is a cloud-based archive which includes retention policies, search, auditing/permissions, etc.
Cloud Backup and Recovery provides a cloud-to-cloud backup of Office 365 which protects email boxes and OneDrive (SharePoint coming soon).
Barracuda Essentials for Office 365 is offered at a per user per month charge and is available in four different SKUs, Email Security Service, Comprehensive Email Security, Email Security and Compliance, and Complete Protection and Compliance. Edition details can be found here.
Works Cited
Barracuda Networks. (2016, April 5). Barracuda Essentials for Office 365. Retrieved from Barracuda.com: https://www.barracuda.com/products/essentials
About the Author
Kate Smith, SecurElement’s Director, Sales & Marketing is responsible for SecurElement’s overall sales and marketing strategy as well as ongoing partner relationships with organizations such as Microsoft, Cisco, Barracuda and many others.
