As cloud computing evolves, it turns out that locally deployed appliances are turning into gateways to a variety of cloud services that either extend or augment a local function. Barracuda Networks this week unveiled two examples involving its own services and that of a third-party partner.
Barracuda Networks today announced Barracuda Backup LiveBoot 2.0, which adds support for Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines to a capability that enables IT organizations to spin up virtual machines on a Barracuda cloud in the event of a disaster or ransomware attack. Barracuda Backup LiveBoot previously only supported VMware.
“Customers can spin up a virtual machine in minutes,” says Tony Liau, senior product marketing manager for Barracuda’s Data Protection Group.
Along with Hyper-V support, Liau says Barracuda has also enhanced the user interface and overall performance of Barracuda Backup LiveBoot with this release.
Barracuda Live Boot runs on data centers managed by Barracuda. While being able to spin up virtual machines as part of disaster recovery strategy is not a new concept, Liau says Barracuda Networks is committed to making that capability available to small-to-medium (SME) enterprises at a price point they can afford. Barracuda Backup LiveBoot 2.0 is available at no additional cost to active users of Barracuda backup software and appliances.
In addition to updating Barracuda Backup LiveBoot, Barracuda is making an edition of that software available to managed service providers via the company’s Intronis business unit.
Meanwhile, earlier this week, Barracuda announced it would also resell a virtual private network (VPN) made available as a cloud service that has been developed by Zscaler. While Barracuda has not yet made any other commitments to reselling cloud services, the Barracuda Web Security Service powered by Zscaler is another example of how Barracuda is starting to aggregate multiple cloud services.
Many of the cloud services that organizations invoke today were originally employed to address one specific use case or another. As time goes by, however, it’s starting to become apparent that many of those cloud services are about to be consolidated.
