Security concerns are on the rise among Web professionals.

In fact, 87 percent of IT professionals surveyed in a May 2012 Intel study indicated they were “very” or “moderately” concerned when it comes to security and data protection in adopting the public cloud - and for good reason. Forrester Research estimates that more than 67 percent of Internet vulnerabilities happen at the application layer. Can anything be done? Yes, yes it can.

Barracuda Networks has recently announced a relationship with Microsoft to offer protection of Web applications hosted in the Windows Azure cloud with the Barracuda Web Application Firewall. Developers using Windows Azure will be able to protect their apps against threats including SQL injection, cross-site scripting, and sessions tampering in the same way they are able to do so in the on-premise data centers.

“We are pleased that Microsoft is working with us to address the risks associated with deploying web applications in the cloud,” said Rod Mathews, vice president for business development at Barracuda Networks. “We are seeing an increase in the need for our customers to deploy high-level application security in their cloud environments to protect the applications themselves and the data that resides in them.”