A trusted partner, a forward-thinking customer, and Barracuda

Exotic Automation — a Michigan-based regional leader delivering advanced industrial solutions — has been growing rapidly, with both organic expansion and acquisitions, so that it now has 19 different sites.

James Bland, the company’s IT Manager, realized that their existing IT infrastructure based on backhauling all traffic through headquarters just couldn’t keep up.

“At the time, we were using two firewalls. We had a SonicWall firewall at headquarters … And as we added mobile service centers, we needed another firewall that could manage dynamic IPs, so we put all of them on Meraki firewalls from Cisco. A lot of traffic had to come in through the Meraki at headquarters and out through the SonicWall, and that became too much to manage as we grew it out. It wasn’t scalable at that rate.”

— James Bland, IT Manager, Exotic Automation

Trusted partner, trusted vendor

James turned to Exotic’s trusted technology partner, Preferred Data Systems (PDS), and Senior Information Technology Advisor Daniel Johnston. Over the course of their decade-long relationship, Daniel and PDS had helped Exotic overcome a number of technology challenges, including migration from an on-premises Exchange server to Microsoft 365. And in many cases, that included the use of Barracuda solutions and services.

“We worked with Barracuda to create an integrated, comprehensive solution that ensured scalable, secure network operations. That solution is built on, and connected with, Barracuda solutions already in place for email and data protection in Microsoft 365, along with cloud-based application security.”

— Daniel Johnston, Senior Information Technology Advisor, Preferred Data Systems

To get the full story on how they accomplished this, and all the benefits that Exotic enjoys as a result, check out this case study. Here are just a few of the highlights:

Building a new, scalable network

Exotic was preparing to move to a new headquarters, which provided a great opportunity to redesign the company’s network from scratch. No more backhauling — every location and mobile unit would have its own local internet breakout.

And the firewalls needed to build this SD-WAN network? “Even though we had to give serious consideration to both SonicWall and Cisco platforms, ultimately Barracuda CloudGen Firewall made the biggest impression on James and his team,” says Daniel.

“Deploying them was, and is, simple. We just send the unit to the location, and all they have to do is plug it in and connect it. Barracuda Firewall Control Center pushes the config file to the firewall, and that’s it. The CloudGen Firewall [also] shows us exactly how traffic is moving through the network and utilizing bandwidth. That lets us optimize ISP costs. We can make sure no locations are over-provisioned with bandwidth.”

— James Bland, IT Manager, Exotic Automation

Cloud-delivered email and data protection

The move from on-prem email to Microsoft 365 came with significant benefits.

“Using Barracuda Email Protection to secure Microsoft 365 seemed like an obvious choice, considering how well our [on-premises] Barracuda gateway appliance had served us. And the fact that it includes Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup was a terrific bonus. It meant we didn’t have to do a whole separate process to find a backup solution for our data in SharePoint and OneDrive and Teams. Having all our email security and data protection managed through a single pane of glass is fantastic. It saves us a lot of time.”

— James Bland, IT Manager, Exotic Automation

E-commerce app security

As Exotic was preparing to deploy a new e-commerce app, James turned again to Daniel for guidance on securing it.

“When James turned to us for application security, the choice was obvious. We showed them how Barracuda Application Protection, using Barracuda WAF-as-a-Service, would meet all their app security needs while also being very simple to use — and that’s a benefit for PDS as well, since we are providing management of the service.”

— Daniel Johnston, Senior Information Technology Advisor, Preferred Data Systems

Get the full story

There’s a lot more to the story of how PDS and Barracuda delivered an integrated, comprehensive security infrastructure for Exotic Automation. See the complete case study and find out:

• How AI-powered email protection makes it easy for Daniel’s team to detect and respond to malicious emails
• How Barracuda helps with regulatory compliance and with demonstrating ROI to upper management
• Why Exotic and PDS are evaluating Barracuda Managed XDR SOC-as-a-Service platform to further simplify and harden the company’s security
• How Barracuda Security Awareness Training “makes users smarter”
• How Barracuda CloudGen Access made it easy to upgrade to a true Zero Trust access control system

It’s obvious that Exotic Automation and Preferred Data Systems are both fans of Barracuda products and solutions. And when you read the complete case study, it’s no mystery why they feel that way.