Financial troubles bite for Barracuda as it kills off cloud services

Barracuda Networks is calling it a day for two of its cloud storage services as financial troubles hit home.

Cuda Drive and Copy.com will both disappear as of the 1st of May this year, with Rod Mathews, VP & GM, Storage Business writing: "We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals."

With this in mind, the company has decided to focus its resources on other areas and shut the services which have been running for over four years.

This move comes at a time where the company has started working with Morgan Stanley as it seeks out potential buyers after losing two thirds of its value, reported Bloomberg. The company’s share value has fallen 69% in the past 12 months.

CudaDrive’s engineering team will be joining the company’s Backup area of business with the goal of accelerating it.

"There is a huge amount of opportunity in Backup, Data Protection and Business Continuity features in the cloud, and adding the talented people from the CudaDrive team will allow us to more quickly and efficiently deploy new features and satisfy market and customer demands," wrote Mathews.

The California-based company which was recently valued at around $600 million is far from the first business that has struggled to expand its business.

LaCie killed off its Wuala service in April last year, Adobe killed off its cloud photo storage offering Revel and HPE called time on its Helion Public Cloud service.

There are a growing number of examples of companies closing down cloud services as they look to consolidate their offerings.

This could be a sign of businesses simply not being able to effectively differentiate their offerings from larger competitors or trying to expand too quickly.

Pricing is clearly a contributing factor for these closures as competing with the likes of Microsoft Azure, Oracle, AWS and Google on price is nearly impossible.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that it’s not enough to just offer cloud services, Barracuda on its blog says that it has had millions of customers using the services that it’s closing, but clearly this was not enough.