Originally reported by BetaNews. Source attribution: betanews.com.
Overview
Cloud security vendor Barracuda Networks announced a set of enhancements to its Barracuda NextGen Firewall and Barracuda Web Application Firewall (WAF) products. The updates are designed to accelerate Microsoft Azure adoption, tighten integration with DevOps toolchains, and extend SD-WAN capabilities for hybrid cloud environments.
Microsoft Azure and OMS Integration
Both the NextGen Firewall and the Web Application Firewall now integrate with Microsoft Operations Management Suite (OMS), Microsoft’s cloud-based IT management platform. The integration gives operations teams centralised visibility into firewall events and security telemetry directly within OMS.
To simplify onboarding, a Barracuda WAF-specific dashboard is available in the Azure Marketplace. Administrators can deploy and configure the dashboard without building custom connectors, reducing the time required to gain actionable insight from WAF log data.
SD-WAN Capabilities in the NextGen Firewall
The NextGen Firewall release adds advanced Software-Defined WAN (SD-WAN) features, allowing organisations to establish secure, optimised WAN connectivity between on-premises locations and cloud-based networks hosted in Azure. SD-WAN features typically include intelligent path selection, traffic shaping, and policy-based routing, which collectively help reduce latency and improve reliability for hybrid workloads.
REST API for DevOps and Continuous Delivery
A key addition for DevOps teams is a comprehensive REST API for the Web Application Firewall. The API enables security and delivery configuration to be managed programmatically, so WAF policies can be version-controlled, tested, and deployed as part of an automated pipeline rather than managed manually through a GUI.
This approach aligns web application security with Continuous Delivery practices by:
- Allowing WAF rules and security profiles to be defined as code and stored in source control.
- Enabling automated provisioning of WAF instances as part of infrastructure-as-code workflows.
- Reducing the risk of configuration drift between development, staging, and production environments.
- Letting DevOps pipelines enforce security controls at deployment time rather than as a post-deployment afterthought.
“Barracuda continues to help customers secure their cloud workloads. The integrations with Microsoft OMS and API-based automation make it easier for customers to integrate security controls into their cloud-native applications. We are constantly innovating to bring more options to our customers for their cloud deployments, and look forward to our customers benefiting from enhanced access and increased automation for their Azure environments.”
— Tim Jefferson, Vice President of Cloud, Barracuda Networks
Puppet Labs Technology Alliance
Barracuda also announced a new technology alliance with Puppet Labs (now Puppet). The partnership focuses on automated orchestration of firewall and WAF configurations using Puppet’s configuration management platform.
The integration is designed to ensure that the relationship between web application deployments and their associated security policies remains in a desired state at all times. In practice, this means:
- Puppet manifests or modules can define and enforce WAF security policies alongside application configuration.
- Security settings are automatically reconciled if they drift from the declared desired state.
- Teams can update security posture consistently across multiple environments as application requirements evolve.
By treating security configuration as a managed resource within Puppet, organisations gain the same repeatability and auditability for security controls that they already apply to operating system and application configuration.
Why This Matters for DevOps Teams
Security tooling has historically lagged behind the pace of DevOps automation. Announcements like this one reflect a broader industry shift toward DevSecOps, where security controls are embedded in the deployment pipeline rather than bolted on after release. Key takeaways for engineering and operations teams evaluating cloud firewall solutions:
- API-driven WAF management is increasingly a baseline requirement for teams practising infrastructure as code.
- OMS/Azure Monitor integration reduces context-switching by surfacing security events in the same tooling used for operational monitoring.
- Configuration management integration (via Puppet or similar tools) helps enforce security policy consistency across dynamic, auto-scaled environments.
- SD-WAN capabilities in a next-generation firewall can simplify hybrid cloud networking while preserving security policy enforcement at the WAN edge.
Teams evaluating these features should verify current product capabilities directly with Barracuda Networks, as the platform has continued to evolve since this announcement.