When Tim Jefferson (pictured) was the head of security and networking business development for Amazon Web Services Inc., he gained insight into the friction that enterprise customers experienced when they moved data center security architectures into the public cloud. Inevitably, the pain points came from architectures that firewalls were deploying, designed to channel data center traffic into a centralized policy enforcement point, vertically scaled.

“That ends up being an anti-pattern in public cloud best practice where you want to build loosely coupled architectures that scale elastically,” said Jefferson, now the vice president of public cloud at Barracuda Networks Inc. “We rearchitected our whole solution portfolio to embrace that.”

Jefferson spoke with Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, at the RSA Conference in San Francisco. They discussed how Barracuda’s technology addresses protection needs and a recent survey that captured industry concerns surrounding public cloud firewall deployment. (* Disclosure below.)

A web application firewall solution

Barracuda’s focus is on simplifying information technology with cloud-enabled solutions that protect networks and data. The wide range of native security services found in public clouds combined with web application firewalls offered by Barracuda are designed to remove the friction and increase protection.

“We give customers the benefit of all the security telemetry you can get out of the native fabric combined with the compliance you get out of web applications and next generation firewalls,” Jefferson explained. “Mine that telemetry out and combine it with control enforcement that the public cloud providers don’t provide and that gives you the best of both worlds.”

Barracuda’s approach plays to questions inside the enterprise computing world surrounding the deployment of traditional firewalls in the cloud. Last month, the company released a survey of IT professionals that showed 83 percent of respondents had concerns about cloud firewall implementations.

“More customers are embracing web application firewalls because the applications … are public facing web apps and those have a unique set of protections,” Jefferson said. “The key is just getting customers to understand … which controls they’re trying to implement and then architect the solutions to embrace the public clouds they’re playing in.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the RSA Conference. (* Disclosure: Barracuda Networks Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Barracuda Networks nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE