Barracuda Acquires Zero Trust Solution Provider Fyde

Security firm Barracuda Networks announced on Thursday that it has acquired Fyde, a provider of Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) solutions.

Barracuda says that Fyde’s technology will allow it to expand its CloudGen Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) platform by adding Zero Trust capabilities.

As Barracuda explains, Fyde’s Zero Trust solution “enables secure, reliable, and fast access to cloud or on-premises applications and workloads from any device and location.”

“Remote work is here to stay, cloud migrations are accelerating, and traditional corporate perimeters have disappeared,” said BJ Jenkins, President and CEO at Barracuda. “With this acquisition, Barracuda is providing distributed businesses a new way to modernize remote access, enforce global security and access policies, and achieve seamless connectivity without compromising productivity,” he added.

The zero-trust concept began in 2004 when the Jericho Forum was established to tackle the problem of ‘de-perimeterization’. John Kindervag (now Field CTO at Palo Alto Networks) is credited with coining the phrase in 2010 when he described a security model that does not assume internal traffic is any more trustworthy than that originating from outside the perimeter. Google brought the concept to public notice with its BeyondCorp — a large-scale solution to the same problem faced by everyone: a globally scattered workforce with many servers in different countries. 

The principle is conceptually simple: protect everything and authenticate everyone before allowing access, with zero assumed trust. The application of zero trust requires that every user is explicitly authenticated, every device is known to be trusted, and access is granted only to authorized assets.

Zero Trust has been a hot area of information security, with several larger security firms making acquisitions to add the category to their offerings. Notable acquisitions in the space include Symantec acquiring Luminate Security, Proofpoint buying Meta Networks, Okta acquiring ScaleFT, and CrowdStrike acquiring Preempt Security. The largest deal in the sector was Cisco’s massive $2.35 billion acquisition of Duo Security in 2018 to get its hands on Duo’s zero-trust authentication and access products.

Previously a public company, Barracuda was taken private by private equity firm Thoma Bravo who acquired the company for $1.6 billion in cash in early 2018.

In this podcast, Sinan Eren, Founder and CEO of Fyde, talks with Security Conversations host Ryan Naraine:

*Additional reporting by Kevin Towsend

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