Neal Bradbury on driving innovation for the channel at Barracuda

For our long-term subscribers and those who have been in the managed services industry for the past two decades, you may be familiar with Neal Bradbury, who co-founded Intronis, a managed service provider (MSP) focused data protection company. 

Recently appointed as the Chief Product Officer at Barracuda Networks, Neal sat down with Julian Lee of eChannelNews to share his journey to this new role, how he’s steering Barracuda’s innovative roadmap, and Barracuda’s mission as a 100 percent channel-focused company.

Here are some highlights Neal shared:

• The importance of the voice of customers: To effectively deliver innovative solutions to our partners, it’s important to bring developers and partners together. It all starts with getting the voice of the customer into the engineering and product teams.  

• A consolidated cybersecurity approach with increased visibility: There are many cybersecurity vendors in the market. Vendors can differentiate themselves by providing a consolidated, unified platform that simplifies the life of the partner and enables them to provide greater value to their customers. For channel partners who are managing their customers’ security postures need proactive monitoring and tools to achieve this. Much of it comes down to increased visibility and managed XDR. This is where Barracuda excels with its open XDR solution. Integrated with over 40 solutions that are commonly used by channel partners, Barracuda XDR not only provides comprehensive visibility of customers’ digital footprint, but it is also backed by a mature 24/7 security operations center (SOC), providing an additional set of eyes to watch over channel partner’s customers. This unified platform is the future of combating the evolving threat landscape.

• Empowering the channel: Every business is at risk from cyberthreats and the challenge of convincing customers to take their security to the next level can be daunting. Barracuda provides tools and resources that empower partners to articulate these risks and demonstrate how Barracuda addresses them to their customers.  

• Finding a balance in artificial intelligence (AI): Leveraging AI is a great opportunity for all businesses, however, there needs to be governance. This is an area where the channel can excel by providing training and education. At Barracuda, we see an opportunity to focus on protecting business applications and LLMs to prevent risks for partners and customers alike. After all, AI is a standard game of cat and mouse in cybersecurity. The bad guys are using it to deliver more sophisticated attacks, and Barracuda is leveraging it to block as many as we can. This will continue for quite some time.

Neal shared many more great insights in this short interview. Listen to the interview to learn more on how he plans to help the channel address cyber risk, bolster their customers’ security posture, and much more.