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Cloud-connected storage and security solutions specialist Barracuda announced Essentials for Office 365, a suite of cloud services designed to help organizations expand on the security and data protection functionality in Office 365.
Essentials combines three of Barracuda’s cloud technology solutions—Email Security Service, Cloud Archiving Service, and Cloud Backup—into a suite of cloud services with simple per-user licensing.
Essentials for Office 365 is currently available and includes simple per-user licensing at $5 per user, per month or less.
“We found that the environments most of our partners’ customers had created for on-premises Exchange deployments were more granular than the baseline environments offered in Office 365, so we saw an opportunity to enhance Microsoft Office 365 with a complementary solution that provided more granularity for email security, compliance and data continuity,” Richard Turner, product marketing manager for Barracuda, told eWEEK.
The email security service extends security protection for Office 365 Exchange Online with additional granular controls, as well as multilayer security against email-borne threats and data leaks with encryption, data-loss protection and content inspection of all emails.
The Cloud Archiving Service offers productivity features, including mobile applications for users to access, search and retrieve email at any time from any device, while cloud-based backup and recovery provides IT administrators with real-time backup that helps simplify the process of recovering accidentally or intentionally deleted emails and files in Office 365.
“We have been careful to price Barracuda Essentials at an aggressive price point, and most of the companies upgrading to Office 365 are eliminating one or more services. Even by adding Barracuda Essentials, they are still at a lower cost than when they had an on-site deployment and had to worry about those items separately,” Turner said.
In a survey by TechValidate focused on customer Office 365 migration and deployment plans, the majority of respondents, 72 percent, reported concerns about, or have not considered, whether the security, compliance and backup features in Office 365 meet the needs of their organizations.
The survey also revealed that many customers are evaluating the need to add multiple layers of protection to Office 365, including expanded security, archiving and compliance functionality.
“Companies will continue to leverage the cloud for more of their day-to-day computing needs,” Turner said. “To this end, Barracuda already has a robust business providing security enhancements such as our Web Application Firewall and Next-Generation Distributed Firewall through public cloud deployments, such as Azure.”