Security

Review: Barracuda CloudGen Firewall VF50 Helps Businesses Protect Many Assets at Once

This virtual security appliance secures as many as 50 assets, no matter where they’re located.

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John Breeden II is an award-winning reviewer and public speaker with 20 years of experience covering technology.

Modern business is complex and always on. Enterprises have complicated hybrid environments that include on-premises and cloud assets, legacy equipment, public-facing websites and more. And even small companies can invest in an intricate mix of IT assets that work around-the-clock.

All those assets and complexity allow businesses to serve more customers and make more money, but this also exposes them to additional risk and a larger attack surface for cybercriminals. The assets need protection, but installing security appliances for each one or at every location creates management challenges that all but defeat the purpose.

Barracuda has a better way to protect everything at the same time, regardless of where it’s located or what kind of IT asset it is. The next-generation CloudGen Firewall is a virtual appliance that can be installed almost anywhere, on-premises or in the cloud. The VF50 model, which I evaluated, also can be easily configured to protect up to 50 IPs, so it can work with multiple sites and assets at the same time.

The Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Is Easy to Deploy

Installing the VF50 is straightforward for anyone who has even a little bit of experience with firewalls. It works with most cloud providers or can be installed on any workstation or server with at least 2 gigabytes of RAM and 60G of free hard drive space. You can use a maximum of two CPU cores to drive it, which provides a good deal of throughput and simultaneous operations before a user would need to upgrade to the VF100 or above.

The VF50 provides all the typical protection that users have come to expect from a quality firewall, plus quite a few advanced protections that form a defense-in-depth strategy to ensure that nearly every threat thrown against it gets caught.

The first level of protection is made up of a firewall IPS and rule-based blocking, application control, dynamic routing, signature-based protection blocking, and web filtering. More advanced protections include static code inspection, SSL interception, behavior analysis and detailed reporting with analytics. It’s clear the VF50 is much more than just a firewall.

The Barracuda CloudGen Firewall Helps Better Protect Your Files

And there is even more protection. At the very top of the onboard protections is a sandbox where the VF50 puts any suspicious files or code that is not fully identified by the previous defenses. Once there, the code is detonated to look for malicious intent.

Any threat detected in the sandbox is not only stopped by the VF50 but is also studied by it so that similar future threats can be blocked without going through the sandboxing process again. That saves resources and prevents shotgun-type attacks from overloading the firewall or bogging down operations.

The VF50 was able to stop all of the polymorphic threats tossed at it from my in-house malware zoo, as well as several that were crafted on the fly with stealth and other obfuscation techniques. Even with never-before-seen threats, so-called zero-day attacks, the VF50 was able to stop them using its defense in depth. Only one threat I crafted made it all the way to the sandbox, and none got past the firewall completely.

All of that makes the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall VF50 a great choice for companies that have expanded to new locations or into the cloud, or that maintain a hodgepodge of different IT assets to keep their businesses always open and moving forward.

SPECIFICATIONS

PRODUCT TYPE: Next-generation virtual firewall
FIREWALL DEFENSES: Application control, intrusion prevention, web filtering, anti-malware/anti-spam, advanced sandboxing and site-to-site VPN
HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS: 2G RAM, 60G hard drive
COMPATIBLE CLOUD PLATFORMS: VMware, Citrix XenServer, Oracle VirtualBox, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform
MAXIMUM IPs ADDRESSES PROTECTED: 50

The VF50 Combines Security with Control

The greatest asset of the Barracuda CloudGen Firewall VF50 is its ability to protect as many as 50 IPs against advanced threats. But that is made even more impressive and functional thanks to a user interface that allows administrators to control all of those defenses from a single location.

As networks expand both on-premises and into the cloud, the VF50 becomes an increasingly good choice for protection because of its ability to defend so many assets in so many locations. There is no need to purchase a new CloudGen firewall each time a new asset is added behind the firewall, unless you exceed 50 IPs.

Despite the complexity of the defenses the VF50 offers, the user interface makes it easy to use, and most processes are fully automatic after the initial setup. Simply point the VF50 to the correct location or asset you want to protect, and then sit back and let it do its thing.

DIG DEEPER: Plug-and-play switches and routers must be properly configured for security.

The VF50 will handle setting up all the APIs that control access to cloud features and will link those assets to the protection engine. All a user needs to do is add any special firewall rules, such as specific websites that are allowed or restricted, or any other protection policies that are different from simply keeping threats away.

This would enable a single administrator to set up complete firewall protection for a branch or remote office’s computing assets, even if there are no qualified IT personnel onsite. And they can do it through the cloud without having to ever visit that location physically.

One of the other advantages to using the VF50 is that Barracuda maintains a deep threat intelligence network that is constantly discovering new attack techniques and patterns and adding that data to its appliances. This is also an automatic process, so when the VF50 updates, it protects every covered asset from the latest network, email, website and web browser threats, all without a human administrator needing to be in the loop.

Powerful protection coupled with a surprisingly easy-to-use interface provides VF50 administrators the power, control and automation they need to keep ahead of the most dangerous threats gunning for their highly distributed modern networks. It can provide powerful protections for businesses with surprisingly little effort.