Gartner Magic Quadrant for Web Application Firewalls
Published 19 October 2020
Barracuda
Barracuda is in the Challengers quadrant. Barracuda has good visibility for its WAF deployment on Microsoft Azure, and for existing Barracuda customers. It has significantly enhanced the feature set of its WAAP, named WAF-as-a-Service, and has gained traction with it during the evaluation period.
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Headquartered in Campbell, CA, Barracuda is a known brand in security and data protection markets, especially for midsize enterprises (MSEs). Barracuda delivers its WAF line in physical or virtual appliances. It is also available as a virtual appliance (Barracuda CloudGen WAF) on Microsoft Azure, AWS platforms and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and it has limited presence in Oracle Cloud and Alibaba. WAF-as-a-Service is based on the CloudGen WAF software stack.
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In recent months, Barracuda has been expanding its WAAP to 61 POPs leveraging public cloud infrastructure. It has released enhancements of the Barracuda Advanced Bot Protection ML Layer, partially by integrating with the InfiSecure bot detection engine.
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Barracuda is a good shortlist contender for organizations looking for WAF virtual appliances deployed on Azure, and for organizations seeking a comprehensive set of features delivered in an easy-to-use, self-service WAAP.
Strengths
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Product Offering: Barracuda has expanded the footprint of Cloud WAF-as-a-Service globally. It has seen rapid growth among midsize customers, especially in North America and Australia.
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Customer Experience: Customers remark on the ease of onboarding and initial setup, Customers routinely deploy the service without involving Barracuda technical support. They quickly set up the default policy that protects across Open Web Application Security Project (OWASP) Top 10, DDoS and malicious bots.
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Capabilities: The vendor has full TLS 1.3 capability, with custom cipher control and perfect forward secrecy.
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Pricing Strategy: Barracuda WAF continues to be perceived as a high-quality, low-cost solution. Barracuda Cloud WAF-as-a-Service includes DDoS protection and bot mitigation at no additional charge.
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Technical Support: Gartner clients continue to make positive remarks about Barracuda’s customer support. Barracuda’s as-a-service offerings may allow support to deal less with tactical issues and more with complex support issues.
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Capabilities: Barracuda’s free WAF add-on Vulnerability Remediation Service is attractive to Barracuda’s small or midsize business (SMB) customers, which often lack the time, money and expertise to support an in-house application scanning program.