Barracuda buys Evo Security to bolster MSP identity tools

Barracuda has acquired identity and access management provider Evo Security.

The deal expands Barracuda's identity security offering for managed service providers.

Evo Security specialises in identity and access management tools for managed service providers, or MSPs. Barracuda plans to integrate the business and its technology into the BarracudaONE platform, while continuing to support existing Evo Security customers.

The acquisition adds Evo Security's tools to Barracuda's existing identity-focused products, including privileged access management, access control, identity protection, backup for Microsoft Entra ID environments, and threat detection and response.

Barracuda is framing the deal around rising demand for identity security as organisations face more attacks linked to compromised credentials, privilege misuse, and lateral movement across systems. MSPs often have to manage large numbers of identities across multiple customer environments, making conventional identity products difficult to use at scale.

Under the combined setup, MSP partners will be able to manage identity controls through a multi-tenant environment. This is intended to reduce the need for customers and service providers to stitch together separate products for authentication, access policy, privileged accounts, and identity threat monitoring.

Platform expansion

The expanded BarracudaONE platform combines four main layers of identity-related security: identity and privilege management; zero trust network access through Barracuda SecureEdge; backup and recovery for Microsoft Entra ID; and managed detection and response across email, endpoints, networks, and cloud systems.

The aim is to address several common weaknesses in identity security operations, including excessive user privileges, inconsistent access policies, broad network access, accidental or malicious changes to identity systems, and fragmented monitoring tools that can miss credential abuse or privilege escalation.

One focus of the acquisition is privileged access management. Evo Security's software is designed to control who can access systems, when they can do so, and under what conditions across partner operations. Barracuda said this approach helps remove standing privileges and supports authentication across users, devices, and endpoints.

Another part of the strategy is tighter control over access paths. Traditional network access models can give users more reach than necessary, increasing the impact of a breach and making governance harder. Barracuda's zero trust access product is intended to replace broad access with identity-based controls tied to least-privilege principles.

Identity focus

Barracuda also highlighted the need for resilience in identity systems. Changes to Microsoft Entra ID, whether accidental or malicious, can disrupt business operations, and its backup product is designed to restore users, groups, policies, and configurations.

For threat detection, Barracuda said its managed XDR service correlates signals from multiple security domains to identify attacks involving compromised credentials, privilege escalation, or movement across systems.

Rohit Ghai, chief executive officer of Barracuda, outlined the company's view of the market after the deal. "In the agentic AI era, protecting both human and non-human identities is imperative for delivering cyber resilience. Existing enterprise identity solutions are complex, costly and fail to meet the needs of MSPs that must scale to securely manage millions of identities across thousands of customer environments. We are thrilled to combine Evo Security's partner-first innovation with our vision of BarracudaONE and offer a complete, intelligent, easy, and open platform that closes this gap. As AI accelerates the speed and scale of identity-centric attacks, this combination is uniquely positioned to help organisations big and small stay ahead of these threats," he said.

Michael Roth, chief executive officer and founder of Evo Security, gave Evo Security's rationale for the deal. "We built Evo Security to solve the identity challenges MSPs face every day. Joining Barracuda gives us the scale, reach and resources to accelerate that mission globally. Our identity‐first approach was designed from day one for MSP operations, and now, together with BarracudaONE, we can bring modern identity security, privileged access management and automation to far more partners and the customers they protect," he said.

The Evo Security team has joined Barracuda, bringing identity expertise into the wider business. Its technology will be embedded into BarracudaONE, while Barracuda continues to support Evo Security's existing MSP base.