New customers come to Barracuda in many different ways. Some are responding to ads. Some are following recommendations from friends or vendors. Some are impressed by a webinar or a presentation at a convention.
But Make-A-Wish Canada was a first in my experience. They became Barracuda customers after cleaning out some closets and stumbling across a couple of very old Barracuda appliances that they didn’t even realize they had! I can’t help wondering if we might owe Marie Kondo a commission …
Adventures in integration
Make-A-Wish Canada is now a single, independent affiliate of Make-A-Wish International. But until a few years ago it consisted of 12 different, independent Make-A-Wish organizations. They decided to merge, along with a 13th organization called The Children’s Wish Foundation. As IT Manager Wyatt Chilton puts it:
“Although the 13 organizations had very similar missions, the way they were structured and the systems they used were completely different. So, integrating them in the wake of the merger was a huge task. When lockdown came we had to interrupt a lot of what we were doing.”
There were other challenges too, including being locked into a contract with an unresponsive MSP. And to top it all off, they were experiencing a huge wave of impersonation and phishing attacks that weren’t being stopped by the native security features in Microsoft 365.
Budget — and closet — to the rescue
The constant phishing attacks didn’t only stress out Chilton and his colleague Ivneet Chadha. It also convinced the organization’s C-level executives to make a serious investment in modernizing their IT security.
Luckily (For us? For them? Both?) it was right about then that they found the lost Barracuda spam filters and asked their IT vendor to arrange a meeting.
“We were going through some closets and stumbled upon a couple of ancient Barracuda appliances,” says Wyatt. “Our trusted IT vendor Keynat Technology put us in touch with Barracuda.”
“When we learned about the various capabilities combined in Barracuda Email Protection, that really appealed to us,” says Ivneet. “Impersonation Protection — the anti-phishing module — was clearly something we could use, as well as the Cloud-to-Cloud Backup to protect all our Microsoft 365 data, including email and SharePoint and OneDrive.”
Benefits of Barracuda Email Protection
Wyatt and Ivneet are pretty clear about the benefits of having Barracuda Email Protection:
“Before, we were getting five or six user reports of suspicious emails every day. Now that’s down to one or two per month. … Just having to chase down and deal with all those phishing emails probably consumed 20 to 30 percent of our IT hours.”
“Because Cloud-to-Cloud Backup is completely in the cloud and fully automated, we’re saving a lot of overhead associated with managing an on-site appliance and running backups and replication by hand.”
“But speaking personally — and I think I can say this on behalf of Wyatt and the rest of the team too — the biggest benefit was better sleep.”
And finally, like so many of our customers, they are big fans of our support team:
“A big contributor to that peace of mind is the very helpful support we get from Barracuda …. Barracuda stays in touch and makes sure we’re getting optimal value from our solution. And any time there’s an issue about anything, the tech support staff really dedicate themselves to finding a solution and educating us about what’s going on. We feel very well taken care of, and that kind of customer focus really makes a difference.”
Get the whole story
Don’t take my word for it. Get the whole case study and see for yourself exactly how and why Make-A-Wish Canada became happy, long-term Barracuda customers.
Also, maybe go clean out some of your closets. You never know what that may lead to.