The impact of cloud migration has grown across all industries and technologies. CRM was one of the first to embrace cloud computing a few decades back when Marc Benioff, founder of Salesforce realized software could be as easy to use as shopping on Amazon.

Networking and cybersecurity company Barracuda has a new secure SD-WAN service built natively on Microsoft Azure. The new Barracuda CloudGen WAN service runs inside Azure Virtual WAN Hubs. Hubs can be interconnected through the Microsoft Global Network. This network architecture can replace costly, inflexible network connectivity circuits, and the entire network can be dynamically sized to match current traffic workload, which can optimize network performance and minimize cost.

The approach is not unlike what VMWare has done with global telecom and cloud companies. Many SD-WAN vendors are working to tightly couple their solutions with one or more cloud vendors. For example, last winter, 128 Technology announced integration with Amazon VPC ingress routing. Versa did the same. A month earlier, Fortinet also tightened its Azure relationship via its suite of cybersecurity offerings.

Last summer, Barracuda made news with its Firewall Insights solution which keeps SD-WAN secure and optimized.

“A cloud-first strategy asks for a different approach on connectivity,” said Leon Sevriens, program manager, IT at Humankind, a large organization in the Netherlands that offers daycare and after-school care, with over 3,000 employees and over 450 locations. “We have invested heavily in Microsoft Office 365 adoption across the organization, and traditional connectivity doesn’t fit the bill anymore. We need a solution that is focused on delivering application performance, not just ‘plain’ connectivity. That’s why we’re moving forward with Barracuda CloudGen WAN.”

In the recent report “Secure SD-WAN: The Launch Pad into Cloud,” Barracuda found that SD-WAN is being used by more than half of those who have added security to their public cloud. As the report explains, “SD-WAN can help overcome the top two security challenges organization are facing when it comes to public cloud: lack of access control and backhauling traffic.”

Secure SD-WAN services built natively on the cloud combine ease of use, full security, and cloud-scalable SD-WAN connectivity to use the Microsoft Global Network as the WAN backbone instead of leased lines. The new Barracuda CloudGen WAN is a SaaS service deployed directly from the Azure Marketplace for as many regions as needed and administered centrally in the CloudGen WAN portal for all office locations and remote endpoints. Since the Microsoft Global Network is automatically provisioned as the backbone for anywhere, anytime application access, service providers can create a pragmatic SASE solution in the public cloud tailored to their specific needs.

“With an all-in-one, secure SD-WAN solution natively built on the public cloud network, enterprises can finally make the shift to more public cloud deployments, both faster and more securely,” said Hatem Naguib, COO at Barracuda. “We appreciate the relationship we have developed with Microsoft over the years and the close collaboration over many months to integrate Barracuda SD-WAN technology natively on Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN Hubs. We know this is the future of networking in the public cloud, and we’re excited to be on this forefront with Microsoft.”

Yousef Khalidi, Corporate Vice President, Azure Networking at Microsoft said, “Cloud-native, secure SD-WAN technology, like the new CloudGen WAN service from Barracuda, provides a fast, reliable, and direct path to Microsoft Azure. We’re pleased to collaborate with Barracuda for this new wave of faster public cloud adoption to help our joint customers optimize network performance.”

Learn about the latest in SASE and SD-WAN at the SASE Summit Summer Series with multiple event dates in August and September, 2020. Learn why SASE matters about how SASE and SD-WAN work together, how SASE is essential to your digital transformation, the importance of self-healing networks and much more.