Barracuda today added analytics to its next-generation firewall that also includes SD-WAN capabilities.

The new security analytics platform, Firewall Insights, ingests and analyzes information from all Barracuda CloudGen Firewalls deployed in an organization’s network — hardware, virtual, or cloud-based deployments. “This could be hundreds or thousands of locations,” said Mike Goldgof, senior director of product marketing at Barracuda. And then it provides insights including dynamic availability information on SD-WAN connections, transport data, security, and web- and network-traffic details.

The platform also includes automation for tasks like scheduling, gathering, consolidating, and analyzing data produced by these firewall appliances. And users can customize reports that can include all or just a subset of the deployed firewalls.

The new analytics extends Barracuda’s capabilities when it comes to securing SD-WAN, Goldgof said. The company’s CloudGen Firewall, launched in 2017, provides both connectivity over WANs and connectivity to the cloud as well as next-generation firewall capabilities.

“It’s been in the market a long time and it’s always been advanced from a perspective of connecting distributed enterprise locations together, Goldgof said. “Our strength is in the distributed network, having the scalability of many locations, and the connectivity and security all built in.”

While a growing number of security vendors are adding added some form of SD-WAN functionality to their appliances, “we were one of the first with secure SD-WAN capabilities,” he added.

The company sees three primary use cases for the product. The first is distributed enterprise. “This is where SD-WAN comes in,” Goldgof said.

The second is cloud migration. “And finally, a big growth area for us, and for this product, is industrial internet of things deployments,” he said. This last use case plays on Barracuda’s other strengths: namely distributed networks and connecting all of these distributed devices to each other, the networks, and the cloud.

“Industrial IoT is a really exciting area because you’ve got large enterprises that are not only worrying about IT infrastructure, but also operational technology,” Goldgof said. “More and more of their factory floor and industrial endpoints are now connected. And when they get connected, they need the same type of information and the same level of security. That’s where our product really shines.”

Barracuda’s announcement comes as another big fish — Cisco — is also investing in its secure SD-WAN and IoT technologies. Earlier this week at Cisco Live the vendor pushed its SD-WAN security to the cloud. And last week it said it will acquire Sentryo, a Lyon, France-based IoT security startup. Sentryo automates device visibility and security for industrial control system networks.