Securing the workspace with Awingu & Barracuda

Expectations of our “workspace” are evolving. The age-mix of businesses is shifting with a much bigger concentration of ‘millennials’. A study from PWC suggests 50% of the global workforce will be constituted of millennials (pdf). 

These millennials bring whole new expectations in flexibility, mobility, and BYOD – and these come on top of the overall business dynamics in the 21st century, resulting in the adoption of cloud services, AI-based. In parallel, businesses are constantly under pressure of cyber attacks.

Clearly, the way we secured our business and workspaces yesterday, will not be suitable for tomorrow (or today). It will require a new mix of tools and way of working.

When Awingu and Barracuda announced their partnership in 2017, this is what they had in mind: help businesses create a secure workspace environment. It doesn’t end in the network, or with end-point security. It’s a holistic approach that must enable flexibility, mobility, BYOD, cloud, and much more in the most secure way ever. Let’s zoom in on a number of angles:

Secure network access
The network is core. It’s the connection between applications, data, and devices. Securing the network has been a top priority (almost) since the day of its conception. This is where the Barracuda WAF and CloudGen Firewall come into place; preventing users with malicious goals to get or break access (e.g. via DDoS attacks).
But these days, your network is also accessed at remote locations, via unsecured networks, by people that are not employees, from devices that are not managed nor trusted on the network. Using classic VPN solutions is an option but might not be sufficient. Awingu goes beyond VPN usage: end-users login via their browser after a secure Multi-Factor Authentication. The connection between the end-user device and the back-end is fully encrypted. There is no local data ‘trailing’ on the device itself. There is never access to the back-end network as such, only to a selection of application servers. So even if the end-user device is compromised, the risk of getting access to data or applications is heavily reduced.

Work in your cloud of choice, including hybrid
Whether it’s SaaS services such as Microsoft Office 365 or IaaS/PaaS platforms as Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, “public cloud” is slowly but surely becoming a default part of many businesses IT architecture. This transition comes with architectural challenges to optimize costs, manageability, and security.
Thinking of a workspace, Awingu is, and remains, the single pane of glass via which end-users access their applications behind one single login. It remains to be so, independent of where the applications and desktops are running. This reality is often hybrid; for example with applications running partly in Azure and in an on-premise data center.Barracuda’s CloudGen Firewall can help enable these hybrid connects thanks to a “zero touch” configuration.
“With Awingu, Barracuda and Microsoft Azure it’s easy to set up a hybrid cloud scenario for businesses that also want to move their legacy apps to the Cloud. They are filling a need for workspaces with zero-touch implementations, high-performance security and multitenancy architecture”
~Jochen Maertens, Founder & CEO at Synergics.

Secure your email access
Still today, email is the #1 communication mechanism in business. The many benefits in TCO, speed, compatibility… come at a cost: it’s also one of the most targeted tools for hackers. It might have started with simple spam and virus infected email. From there it has evolved to things like phishing and CEO fraud attacks. These attacks must be protected at the source. That’s exactly where Barracuda Essentials comes in the picture with a comprehensive email threat protection. It combines behavioral, heuristic, and sandboxing technologies to protect against zero-hour, phishing and ransomware variants like Locky and CryptoLocker.
Want to find out more on how Barracuda and Awingu can help your business evolve to a secure, flexible, mobile workspace? Contact us here.

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