Barracuda scales in-text search with Azure Data Explorer

Headquartered in Campbell, California, Barracuda strives to make business safer by delivering cloud-enabled, enterprise-grade security solutions to companies around the world. With innovative offerings to protect email, networks, data, and applications, Barracuda’s cybersecurity solutions are designed to grow and adapt to customers’ unique digital transformation journeys. 

A key Barracuda offering is its data protection product, Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup. The service allows customers to flexibly backup and restore Teams, Exchange, SharePoint, and OneDrive data either fully or with high granularity. The challenge the Barracuda team faced was enabling granular text search within the Cloud-to-Cloud Backup service. They needed a cost-efficient, reliable and secure data platform that could deliver low latency data search results to their end-customers.

Laying the foundations for growth

“We were not as agile as we wanted to be,” begins Brad Voth, Senior Director of Engineering at Barracuda. “We needed the ability to add features to manage the large growth we were seeing in the cloud. But primarily, we wanted to enable our customers to find a particular item that they were looking for to restore or recover in their environment very quickly. For that, we knew we needed a way to perform ad hoc searches for data. We looked at a few different options and ended up choosing Azure Data Explorer (ADX) because it was a straightforward solution. It didn’t require a lot of management and fit neatly within our needs.”

“The Barracuda data protection team specifically chose to work with Microsoft on Azure,” says Chris King, Senior Director of Product Management at Barracuda. “It was time to modernize the solution. Microsoft continues to provide deep collaboration and support for the migration to Azure and development efforts leveraging Microsoft native services. The Microsoft team is available for us when we need them. A big differentiator was Microsoft’s help providing the required agility and scalability.”

A seamless fit

Barracuda had already been leveraging Azure Blob Storage, Azure Kubernetes Service, and Cosmos DB when they made the switch. These technologies integrated easily with ADX. Voth explains, “Running ADX has been incredibly hands-off, compared to a lot of the other pieces of infrastructure that we had been dealing with.”

By offering a SaaS solution to its customers, built on ADX, Barracuda’s multi-tenant approach has seen a boost. “We use a separate database per customer, which gives us the ability to quickly add an additional customer or remove one,” says Voth. “ADX allows simplified management of the data without having to pick through the data and filter it manually. We just use the pre-existing delineation.”

Securely scaling up

One of Barracuda’s major goals in choosing ADX was being able to scale our platform to the point where we can serve more customers. 

Voth noted, “The Azure platform enables us to use very similar methodologies to those we’re using for Azure Blob and Cosmos DB in order to get authentication tokens and other required controls into the services that talk to ADX. For this, we use Azure Key Vault and other types of ready-to-go functionalities. Not having to reinvent those capabilities definitely made a difference for us.”

Efficiency at every level

Barracuda’s engineers are also enjoying the use of ADX’s query language, KQL. “They love its flexibility and the ability to chain multiple queries together to manipulate the results. It fits perfectly with the mentality of our engineering team on how to manipulate data through multiple stages of a pipeline. It mapped really well to the team's current process,” shares Voth.

Customer growth

“Azure has improved our ability to be fast and nimble,” says King. “We can now quickly move from conceiving a feature to rolling it out to customers which wasn't something you traditionally get out of software development. Production time has dropped so the turnaround time we can achieve is greatly improved.”

Thanks to this agility and the robust capabilities offered by the new platform, Barracuda has seen an increase in the number of new clients it onboards. “The growth of the new platform has outpaced our goals, which is always a terrific way to start,” enthuses King. “Currently, we are onboarding significantly more customers in a given month than we were prior to our new ADX-enabled platform coming out. It’s everything we hoped for from a product market fit perspective.”