Barracuda Networks is updating its product lineup today with SecureEdge, a new SASE service.

The Barracuda SecureEdge is a service-based offering that is designed for both enterprises as well as managed service providers. The SecureEdge integrates a series of capabilities needed for SASE including SD-WAN, firewall, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) as well as secure web gateway (SWG).

The SecureEdge is not the first time Barracuda has ventured into the SASE market. In 2021 Barracuda announced its first SASE service, which some analysts were less than impressed with. Stefan Schachinger, product manager for network security, explained to SDxCentral that back in 2021 Barracuda announced the predecessor CloudGen WAN that was tightly integrated with Microsoft Azure.

"The best parts of the previous product together with new functionality have made it into the new SecureEdge platform," Schachinger said.

While the CloudGen WAN SASE technology relied heavily on Microsoft Azure, SecureEdge is about a lot more.

Schachinger said that the Microsoft Azure integration with WAN connectivity using Microsoft’s backbone network is still available in SecureEdge. It is, however, that’s only one of many options for deployment.

For example, he noted that there is now the Barracuda hosted SaaS solution, and a private-deployment option that can be hosted by enterprises and service providers. Schachinger added that firewall-as-a-service and SD-WAN functionality is required in multiple different locations, on premises and in the cloud, to provide secure and seamless connectivity from sites, things and users to all kinds of workloads.

[caption id="attachment_129972" align="alignnone" width="689"] The Barracuda SecureEdge provides a unified status dashboard for SASE.[/caption]

SecureEdge also integrates improvements to the ZTNA, SWG and secure internet access functionality to be able to provide a consistent security posture. Schachinger said that consistent security posture is combined with a unified user experience regardless of where the end users decide to work from.

Going a step further, SecureEdge also includes Barracuda's IOT security solution, known as the Secure Connector.  Schachinger said that with Secure Connector, SecureEdge users are able to securely connect dispersed IoT environments with a minimal effort.

While SecureEdge consists largely of a series of existing Barracuda technologies,  Schachinger emphasized that the new offering isn't just a bundle of services, rather in his view it's an integrated platform solution.

"Along with new features one of the key requirements was to have a unified and cloud hosted single management interface," Schachinger said. "The SecureEdge Manager cloud portal is that single point of control that is used for deployment, configuration and maintenance by our customers and it also supports multi-tenancy for our MSP partners."

Among the integrated capabilities in the SecureEdge is support for enabling intent-based networking for SASE.

Schachinger explained that the SecureEdge has user and group ID, Application definitions and corresponding enforcement points directly at the end device, at the on-premise sites, and in the cloud. As a result, the SecureEdge can make the appropriate networking and security decisions for traffic. He noted that with SecureEdge an organization only needs to define an application once, and then this information is available to the security, SD-WAN and ZTNA parts of the product.

"The system makes all the necessary routing, SD-WAN optimization and security decisions autonomously," Schachinger said. "The system includes pre-set traffic prioritization and optimized routing to make smart decisions about the best paths for network traffic based on the end user’s intention."