Barracuda Cloud Application Protection (CAP) platform features integrations with Microsoft Azure Active Directory (Azure AD) and Azure Security Center. A component of CAP, Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service is built on Microsoft Azure and provides advanced WAF capabilities in an easy to deploy and manage solution.

In our last blog, I spoke about how Barracuda and Microsoft are working together to remove barriers to faster public cloud adoption. The post focused on remote access, networks, and secure connectivity to public cloud. The topic of this blog post is to share some thoughts on how web applications in public cloud are secured. 

Accelerating digital transformation

As I mentioned last time, digital transformation is fundamentally changing today’s enterprises, making digital assets—data and applications—key to doing business. Organizations are increasingly competing based on their digital agility, and of course web applications are central to how digital businesses operate today.

In order to develop and update applications faster, organizations are deploying DevOps processes and agile methodologies, and they are moving their infrastructure to the cloud. However, while applications are developed and deployed faster than ever, secure coding practices have not kept pace, resulting in a constantly growing number of open vulnerabilities that can be exploited.

At the same time, the threat environment is continuously evolving and becoming more challenging. Hackers are getting more sophisticated; they are now professional criminals or even nation states. In addition to manual hacking attacks, bots and botnets are increasingly used to attack enterprise infrastructures through web applications. These automated exploits are often executed as Distributed Denial of Service (or DDoS) attacks, at both network and application layer. And of course, malware is constantly getting more advanced. The growth in the number of unprotected application vulnerabilities, coupled with the increase in hacking and malware, has resulted in a perfect storm of data breaches. So, application security is a key requirement for successful digital transformation. A recent Microsoft Build 2020 blog post focused on how Microsoft is helping developers build more secure applications.

Is the latest health crisis going to slow down the digital transformation process? In fact, it appears the opposite is occurring—it is acting as a catalyst. In the last blog, we discussed how the sudden increase in remote work is accelerating the network evolution. In addition, similar changes are occurring in the applications landscape.

As people stay at home due to government orders, they are increasingly transacting online. Brick-and-mortar stores are closed, and to stay in business retailers and other businesses are shifting all their operations online.

Leveraging public cloud for web applications

Such rapid scaling of online operations is difficult and expensive to achieve using traditional datacenters. Fortunately, public cloud providers such as Microsoft Azure provide robust platforms that allow customers to quickly scale up application infrastructure—now things can be completed in days or even hours, instead of weeks or months. And of course, the flexibility that comes with public cloud deployments is especially valuable now, as there is a lot of uncertainty about how long lockdowns will continue and whether online capacity would need to be reduced in the future.

We have seen a significant increase in hacking, DDoS, and bot attacks during the last couple of months, so in addition to scaling up online capacity, it is critically important to ensure security and availability. Using a complete application security platform is the best way to protect applications from all attack vectors, including hacking, DDoS, bots, and even API attacks.

In the new report, Future shock: the cloud is the new network,¹ published in February, Barracuda surveyed 750 IT decision makers responsible for their organizations’ cloud infrastructure. We learned that organizations are well on their way to moving their infrastructure to public cloud, with 45 percent of IT infrastructure already running in the cloud today and rising to an estimated 76 percent in 5 years.

At the same time, the top concern restricting an even faster adoption of public cloud is security, with 70 percent of the respondents indicating that security concerns restrict their organizations’ adoption of public cloud.

If you look at the type of security issues that are the biggest blockers to public cloud adoption, the top two are sophisticated hackers and open vulnerabilities in applications. Also on the list are DDoS attacks and advanced bots/botnets, and from conversations with both customers and analysts since the onset of COVID-19, it appears that both DDoS attacks and bot attacks have spiked up even higher.

About Barracuda

At Barracuda we strive to make the world a safer place. We believe every business deserves access to cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy, and use. We protect email, networks, data, and applications with innovative solutions that grow and adapt with our customers’ journey. More than 150,000 organizations worldwide trust Barracuda to protect them—in ways they may not even know they are at risk—so they can focus on taking their business to the next level. For more information, visit barracuda.com.

View our integration videos

• Barracuda integrates with Azure Active Directory
• Barraduca Cloud Security Guardian integrates with Microsoft Graph Security API

For more information on Microsoft Security Solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

¹Future shock: the cloud is the new network, Barracuda, February 2020

The post Barracuda and Microsoft: Securing applications in public cloud appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.

Barracuda’s CloudGen Firewall is tightly integrated with Microsoft Azure Virtual WAN, Azure Active Directory (Azure AD), Azure Security Center, and Azure Sentinel. Integrated into Azure, Barracuda’s networking and security capabilities enable customers’ secure infrastructure migrations and the use of public cloud for additional security solutions such as scalable remote access.

As I write this blog, people in many areas around the world continue to stay home due to lockdowns and shelter-in-place orders, while some countries and states are starting to gradually relax restrictions to get at least some businesses and operations re-opened. These are unprecedented times, and a lot of uncertainty remains. Will most people go back to commuting and working mostly from their offices? Or will the world substantially shift to working from home? How will our recent experiences affect key technology trends such as digital transformation and IT infrastructure migration to public cloud?

Accelerating digital transformation

Digital transformation is fundamentally changing today’s enterprises, making digital assets—data and applications—key to doing business. As more value shifts from physical to digital assets, businesses increasingly compete based on how quickly they can ramp up and manage their digital assets; in effect, they are becoming digital businesses. DevOps processes, agile methodologies, and the move to cloud help enterprises to develop and update their digital assets faster.

By their nature, in order to generate value, digital assets need to be networked and available. These assets need to be protected from threats that are continuously evolving and becoming more challenging. Hackers are getting more sophisticated and malware is constantly getting more advanced. So, security is a critical requirement for successful digital transformation.

In speaking with customers and partners, we at Barracuda are hearing one consistent theme: It appears that the crisis and the resulting changes in work patterns are accelerating digital transformation. In many parts of the world, for example, where working from home has not been common and the infrastructure was not built to support it, IT professionals are evaluating how to enable it. In places where electronic signatures have not yet gone mainstream, there is a strong push for wider acceptance. Industries and geographies relying on brick-and-mortar stores are quickly moving operations online.

Leveraging public cloud for remote access

Public cloud adoption and cloud connectivity are key long-term trends that are getting an additional boost from the latest crisis. As lockdowns and restrictions went into effect, we at Barracuda got a major increase in customer requests for scaling up remote access functionality. IT departments were asked to very quickly ramp up remote access capabilities.

This is one example where public cloud can be quickly leveraged to expand remote access capacity. While an on-premises firewall or VPN gateway may not be sized to provide remote access to the entire employee population now working from home, it may be a complicated and lengthy process to expand that capacity. A quicker option is to stand up a remote access service in public cloud and connect it back to the on-premises firewall. This solution can be acquired from the Microsoft Azure Marketplace on a pay-as-you-go basis, for example, and set up within hours. All remote workers are given a new website to connect, and VPN and security processing are offloaded to the cloud. The entire system can be quickly and easily scaled up when shelter-in-place restrictions go into effect and scaled down when employees go back to working in the office.

Public cloud and SD-WAN

Remote access is, of course, just one example of the fact that traditional network and security infrastructures are inflexible—they cannot effectively accommodate digital transformation requirements. The health crisis just brought this into the spotlight. The move to public cloud is already broadly under way, and networks need to catch up.

In the new report, Future shock: the cloud is the new network,* that was published in February, Barracuda surveyed 750 IT decision makers responsible for their organizations’ cloud infrastructure. We learned that organizations are well on their way to moving their infrastructure to public cloud, with 45 percent of IT infrastructure already running in the cloud today and rising to an estimated 76 percent in five years.

At the same time, companies need to re-evaluate their security strategies as they move to public cloud, with 70 percent of respondents indicating that security concerns restrict their organizations’ adoption of public cloud. And their solution of choice for optimizing and securing access to public cloud is a fully integrated secure SD-WAN, with 56 percent of respondents having already deployed or are in the process of deploying it.

About Barracuda

At Barracuda, we strive to make the world a safer place. We believe every business deserves access to cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions that are easy to buy, deploy, and use. We protect email, networks, data, and applications with innovative solutions that grow and adapt with our customers’ journey. More than 150,000 organizations worldwide trust Barracuda to protect them—in ways they may not even know they are at risk—so they can focus on taking their business to the next level. For more information, visit barracuda.com.

View our integration videos:

• Barracuda integrates with Azure Active Directory
• Barraduca Cloud Security Guardian integrates with Microsoft Graph Security API

For more information on Microsoft Security Solutions, visit our website. Bookmark the Security blog to keep up with our expert coverage on security matters. Also, follow us at @MSFTSecurity for the latest news and updates on cybersecurity.

*Future shock: the cloud is the new network, Barracuda, February 2020

The post Barracuda and Microsoft: Removing security barriers to faster public cloud adoption appeared first on Microsoft Security Blog.