Case Study: Cairn Group achieves secure remote working and breach protection with Barracuda Networks

Coping with crisis Leading hotel group tackles cyber risk with flexible firewall and backup devices

Cairn Group, a family-run hospitality business based in Newcastle with 30+ hotels and bars across the UK, faced significant IT security gaps: basic routers with no network visibility or granular firewall controls, poor client-to-site connectivity, rising phishing attacks targeting guest-facing email accounts, and failing tape-based backups. These weaknesses risked guest data and hampered productivity, especially as the business needed consistent infrastructure across all sites.

Cairn Group deployed Barracuda CloudGen Firewall F380 appliances and Barracuda Backup 290/490 units to provide advanced firewalling, site-to-site and client VPN, web security, sandboxing, and centralized backup. The result was seamless secure remote working during COVID with 200+ daily VPN users, breach-free operation for over two years, multiple phishing attacks blocked, granular URL controls for staff browsing, and rapid recovery capabilities to mitigate ransomware and data loss.

Cairn Group

Adam Rylatt

Security Field Engineer