As vice president of technology for The Giumarra Companies — a major nationwide U.S. produce distributor — Jay Glatt has been working with Barracuda solutions for about 15 years. In that time, the company’s engagement with Barracuda has evolved, starting with Barracuda Web Security and expanding to include Barracuda Email Protection and Cloud-to-Cloud Backup.
As part of our celebration of Barracuda’s 20 year anniversary, we recently sat down with Jay to talk about his experiences with Barracuda, the benefits of being a long-term Barracuda customer, and how his trust in Barracuda solutions has grown over the years.
Q&A with Jay Glatt, VP of technology at The Giumarra Companies
Tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do.
I started with Giumarra back in 1992, and I was a consultant here helping them develop their ERP system. Then in 2003 they offered me a position here. I started off as just a regular coder, or developer coder as they call them now. I moved from there to Director of IT and then VP of IT.
When did you start using Barracuda solutions at Giumarra?
It started with web filtering. Around 2008, we had a situation where our bandwidth throughout the company was really being gobbled up, and we realized that people were playing games and even watching television on their PCs. We decided we needed to have a web filter, and that allowed us to cut our bandwidth usage as well as to eliminate some of the bad behavior. Barracuda Web Security Gateway really stood out when we looked at solutions. It did everything we wanted, and was just very easy to use, very simple to configure exactly how we wanted.
How did the engagement with Barracuda expand from there?
After that we started using Barracuda for email security, which helped cut down on the amount of spam our users were getting, compared to our previous solution. We expected to be moving things to the cloud, so after looking into it, we switched to Barracuda Email Gateway Defense. It could secure our on-prem system, and it would be even more capable once we moved productivity to the cloud. And it would be one less appliance to maintain and update, since it’s a cloud-delivered service.
From there, we upgraded to add Incidence Response. Barracuda Incident Response is just what I wanted. I had just been thinking about the problem of quickly finding and securing or deleting every instance of a suspicious email. Incident Response does all that automatically, it finds the bad emails and I click a few buttons, see who got this email, and delete it from every inbox.
Then when we needed to start backing up Microsoft 365 data, we added Barracuda Cloud-to-Cloud Backup. The truth is, I didn’t even evaluate any other backup options. I called Barracuda, and we upgraded Barracuda Email Protection by adding Cloud-to-Cloud Backup to what we already had. I have come to trust Barracuda that much. As we move more and more to the cloud, having advanced security against the most dangerous new email threats simply makes sense. I expect to continue relying on Barracuda as our security partner well into the future.
As a longtime customer, what do you like most about working with Barracuda? What made you comfortable growing the engagement with Barracuda over the years?
One is the reliability. That is probably the best thing. We knew that whatever product we were looking at that it was going to work based on our previous experience, so it was easy to add more solutions because we knew the reliability and the reputation of Barracuda. Another thing is the customer support and the technical expertise on Barracuda side. I’ve never really had a bad experience. I also like the single pane of glass to see everything.
In your opinion, what sets Barracuda apart from other vendors?
I think the one thing that really sets Barracuda apart and that I can always depend on is the Technical Support. I’ve not only learned how to work with Barracuda solutions better, but they’ve taught me how to work with my products better. They are always there, just a phone call away. They’re happy to work with you, and they direct you to articles and things that can help you so that you learn and become more independent and self reliant. Once you come onboard with Barracuda, you get this relationship where you’re helping each other.
I joke that Barracuda’s support team is the Southwest Airlines of customer service because they’re always cheerful, relaxed, and ready to make sure any issue gets resolved efficiently.