Barracuda Networks (NYSE: CUDA) is a provider of cloud-connected security and storage solutions. The California based company has a current market cap of $1.80 billion.

Justifiably, there is a lot of hype and excitement about the prospect of cloud computing, and the ROI and efficiencies that it will offer IT departments and business units. Together with this the explosion of mobile devices are forcing dramatic changes in the way the network infrastructure. Amid this hype, however, it is critical to render consideration to how the cloud will affect the way networks are designed, conceived, and secured. Cloud era means a dramatic increase in the sheer volume of data passing into and out of networks at any given moment – a growing amount of it critical to business operations. Content security in particular faces novel challenges as mobility and Web2.0 applications make web traffic volumes highly unpredictable, with massive spikes and troughs from one moment to the next.

The traditional approach to address concerns like these has been over-provisioning compute resources for content filtering, resulting in higher costs and lost efficiency, while still introducing unacceptably high latency and eroding network performance. However, emerging solutions adopt a different approach, by transferring content-filtering tasks to cloud-hosted services where massive resources can be dynamically re-provisioned as needed to handle any volume of web traffic without bogging down the network.

Ensuring Security in High Data Traffic

To maintain network security, content-filtering solutions must examine all the business-critical traffic that these activities create. This can lead to a kind of arms race, where in order to maintain acceptable network performance; organizations must purchase ever larger appliances and provision ever greater resources to content filtering. In addition to this legitimate, business-critical traffic, the volume of non-productive traffic is also growing exponentially.