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Mongolia Energy migrates heavy firewall workloads to cloud

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Barracuda Networks, a US-based provider of security, networking and data protection solutions, announced last Friday to offer end-to-end protection solutions to Hong Kong. The solutions range from content security, application delivery to data protection.

Headquartered in Silicon Valley in the US, Barracuda Networks has 1,000 employees worldwide. It first established an office presence in Hong Kong in 2004, and is now 100% focused on channel sales through two distributors, Data World and Westcon Solutions.

Other than Hong Kong, Barracuda Networks has presence in China, Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Malaysia, India and Australia in the Asia Pacific.

In Hong Kong, Barracuda Networks targets at financial institutions, manufacturing, government and public sectors. It runs a "local" support team of 10 post-sales engineers in Guangzhou and Shenzhen in China to respond to hardware failure enquiries over the phone.

Next-generation firewall

Barracuda's signature product, the Barracuda Next-Generation Firewall, is a suite of hardware and virtual appliances that integrate a set of next-generation firewall technologies: Layer 7 application profiling, intelligent traffic management, intrusion prevention, Web filtering, anti-virus, anti-spam and network access control.

According to Rick Tam, Barracuda Networks' Asia regional director, the company identifies Palo Alto as its closest competitor in the firewall market, alongside McAfee, Sophos, Fortinet and Symantec

While traditional firewall enables ports, packets, protocols and anti-virus scanning, the next-generation firewall provides application control and identity awareness. As for Barracuda Networks' next-generation firewall, its uniqueness lies in its abilities to optimize the WAN, enable centralized management, scalability and remote network access, Tam said. He added that the next-generation firewall also enables live recovery and supports the 3G network, and is on its way to support the 4G network.

Barracuda Networks' next-generation firewall is said to enhance visibility into user behavior, enable intelligent network management such as bandwidth allocation, network optimization and traffic prioritization, as well as enable network protection including network access control for smart phones and secure remote access.

Scaling firewall performance for 10,000 users

Last week, Barracuda Networks completed the deployment of its next-generation firewall for Mongolia Energy Resources LLC, serving up to 10,000 users. This deployment now becomes the first install site of Barracuda Networks' next-generation firewall in Asia.

Recently, Mongolia Energy Resources needed to improve the visibility and control over the online behavior of its 10,000 staff and considered various options of web filtering. The management at Mongolia Energy Resources was concerned about the company's network communications to China and other countries, fearing external virus attacks and intrusion attacks. And as Mongolia Energy Resources considered to adopt BYOD (bring your own device), the IT department sought a means to ensure the devices were healthy and were free from virus infections, which might otherwise infect the corporate network.

The performance of firewall is commonly known to deteriorate if all of the products or functions were turned on simultaneously, but Mongolia Energy Resources needed a solution that could support its huge user base of 10,000. After studying online materials, it approached Barracuda Networks for its next-generation firewall. With the help of Barracuda Networks, Mongolia Energy Resources was able to migrate the heavier workloads, such as web filtering and malware scanning, to Barracuda Networks-managed public cloud.

According to Vernon Chow, system consultant of Barracuda Networks, by offloading the heavy workloads to the cloud, Mongolia Energy Resources can benefit from the resiliency of next-generation firewall. "If one box was down, the traffic will be routed to Europe, the US or Japan for resiliency," Chow said. Barracuda Networks currently operates two data centers in Asia, China and Japan.

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