Security awareness training a key priority for Multi Masters

Some customers who purchase Barracuda Email Protection consider the built-in Barracuda Security Awareness Training to be little more than a nice-to-have bonus. That may explain why, when I interview customers in order to write up a case study, that is the number-one capability about which I hear “we plan to implement that, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet.”

Other customers, however—like Multi Masters Group and its ICT Manager Erik Geers—consider security awareness training to be a top priority. They’re the ones who are acutely aware that insider risk is very often a contributing factor in successful cyberattacks. 

In fact, Security Awareness Training was, to Erik, the most compelling feature of Barracuda Email Protection, leading him to choose it over other solutions to protect his Multi Masters’ Microsoft 365 deployment.

Targeted, real-world training

You can read the whole story here, but one thing that Erik emphasized was his appreciation of the ability to identify the most frequently targeted users in the organization and apply extra, focused training on to those users.

He also likes being able to use a wide variety of built-in templates to create “authentic” phishing simulations, including templates built specifically for Belgian users like the majority of Multi Masters’ employees.

Another feature of the training module that Erik likes is the ability to customize phishing simulations based on what they find in spam logs. 

“If it’s something new we’re surprised about we can use it in training. We’re at the stage now where if most users see something suspicious they forward the email or call us to ask what to do with it. It makes me feel a bit safer knowing our users are improving in their awareness.” — Erik Geers, ICT Manager, Multi Masters Group

More security capabilities

Of course, Erik and his team like other capabilities besides Security Awareness Training. For example, he’s been delighted with how easily and quickly he can remediate email incidents using Barracuda Incident Response—in the first six months his team rapidly remediated more than 90 separate malicious emails, ensuring users wouldn’t unwisely click. 

Advanced SD-WAN

But wait, there’s more! At the same time as they got Barracuda Email Protection, Erik and his team purchased 18 Barracuda CloudGen Firewall appliances to create a highly secure, flexible SD-WAN network connecting all the company’s locations and providing robust access to cloud-hosted applications.

One huge benefit is the visibility Erik gets into network-wide traffic patterns, and the ease with which he can analyze it. Early in their CloudGen Firewall deployment they realized that many attacks on their servers were coming from specific countries, that they were able to block.

“One of the things that’s really easy to do is to block certain countries, because we don’t operate globally,” he explains. “We saw a lot of attacks on our servers originated from Russia, China and other countries, so it was easy to block them. We have more control over the traffic coming into our network, which is very important to me.”— Erik Geers, ICT Manager, Multi Masters Group

Get the whole story

To learn about all the reasons that Erik and his team chose Barracuda Email Protection and Barracuda CloudGen Firewall—and why they’re so happy with them that they’re soon adding Barracuda Application Protection—download the full case study.