Case Study: South West College achieves complete Office 365 email security and rapid incident response with Barracuda Networks Total Email Protection

Large Northern Ireland college gains complete O365 security South West College trusts Barracuda Total Email Protection

South West College, a large Northern Ireland further-education institution with five main campuses, about 850 staff and 12,000 active student accounts, needed to secure its Office 365 environment after migrating email, SharePoint and Teams to the cloud. The college faced increasingly sophisticated phishing attacks, limited operating budgets that required a phased approach, and a need to streamline and accelerate incident response and data protection.

The college deployed Barracuda Total Email Protection—including Essentials, Sentinel, PhishLine, Cloud-to-Cloud Backup and Forensics & Incident Response—first implementing email filtering and backup, then adding AI-driven phishing detection and automated forensics. Results included a dramatic reduction in phishing, thousands of emails quarantined, incident-response time cut from ~30 minutes to ~30 seconds, robust cloud backups for continuity, improved user awareness through training, and centralized dashboard reporting.

South West College

George Frazer

Technical Services Manager