Barracuda Networks officially launched its secure access service edge (SASE) platform this week, but according to Zeus Kerravala, principal analyst at ZK Research, the vendor is really “SASE in name only.”

On the surface, Barracuda looks to offer at least four of the five core SASE competencies outlined by Gartner including SD-WAN, firewall, zero-trust network access, and secure web gateway.

And because the platform is based on a cloud-native foundation, the vendor claims these services can be deployed wherever they are needed, whether that’s in the cloud, at the branch, or on the device. But where the company breaks with its larger competitors in the SASE space is in how the service is delivered.

Most SASE vendors including Cisco, Versa, and Palo Alto Networks host their SASE stacks in a combination of cloud and colocation data centers to ensure seamless access from anywhere in the world.

Versa Networks, for example, boasts 90 points of presence (PoPs) from which it delivers its SASE product. Barracuda, in contrast, doesn’t provide any SASE PoPs of its own at this time. Instead, it enables its enterprise customers to host their own personal SASE in the Microsoft Azure public cloud, Tim Jefferson, SVP of engineering and product management at Barracuda, told SDxCentral.

What makes the company’s SASE unique is the ability for customers to deploy the offering wherever it’s needed, he explained, arguing that this gives the customer “the agility to spin up and tear down hubs accordingly, instead of signing long-term agreements.” The idea being that enterprises can create a SASE PoP anywhere Microsoft has a cloud data center rather than relying on the vendor or service provider to add one somewhere down the line.

But Barracuda’s decision not to host its own security stack in the cloud begs the question of whether it’s really a SASE platform in the first place. Kerravala argues it’s not.

“I don’t really think that’s SASE because it’s not really cloud; it’s more virtualized security services that live in a customer's own cloud,” he said. “You don’t get the benefits of shared infrastructure.”

“To me, this is SASE in name only,” he added. “You can almost look at this as kind of a poor man’s SASE.”

That’s not to say a product like this can’t be successful. Kerravala said Barracuda’s SASE offering will likely see some success among existing customers interested in adopting modern security architectures.

“If you’re a small business, and you’re not doing a lot, you’re already a Barracuda customer, and you want to migrate to something that’s a little more cloud like than what you have on-prem, this will probably work, but I think that that’s a pretty small [market],” he said. But, “if you’ve got a highly-dynamic workforce, I don’t know if this would work because you'd have to spin up services everywhere.”

In addition to unifying its security and networking stack, Barracuda also announced a slate of new security capabilities, including expanded incident response and data classification functionality.

Barracuda incident response data can now be fed into third-party security orchestration, automation, and response; security information and event management; and extended detection and response platforms at the API level. The company claims the integration will help customers proactively identify and remediate threats.

The company also announced tools to proactively identify sensitive data — credit card numbers, user credentials, and passwords — circulating on Microsoft OneDrive and SharePoint. The service can determine whether the information has been shared internally or externally, as well as where and with who it has been shared.