Known as the Barracuda NG Firewall, the new platform draws on technology designed by Phion, the Austrian IT security firm that Barracuda acquired in September of last year.
According to Stephen Pao, Barracuda's vice president, the NG Firewall is a unique offering in that it was designed specifically for distributed environments.
Barracuda says that the new firewall packages web and email filtering, intrusion prevention, layer 7 application profiling and network access control into a single platform that can be centrally managed across multiple enterprise network locations.
Pao said that new platform was originally built from the ground up as a project to manage more than 650 firewalls for a large Austrian banking data centre.
"With early development roots not only in centralised configuration, policy and reporting, but also in site-to-site WAN traffic management capabilities, the NG Firewall is designed to optimise both the availability and performance of the WAN, with lower administrative overhead than incumbent systems", he explained.
Barracuda says that the new firewall will pair up well with other improvements the company is undertaking thanks to its acquisition of Purewire last year.