Barracuda Networks' financial woes look to be biting, as the company has announced it is killing its cloud storage services, CudaDrive and Copy.com, and focussing resources on stuff that really matters.

The company has blogged the news, with Rod Mathews - veep and general manager of the company's storage business – saying CudaDrive may have won millions of users, but that it's not proved sufficiently “strategic”.

“We are constantly evaluating our product portfolio in the context of our overall strategic goals,” Mathews wrote. “With that in mind, we have begun a process to focus our resources on our most strategic initiatives and to drive more innovation and faster growth within those products.”

Or in other words, we're putting people on stuff we think can make money and/or grow.

Unlike, obviously, cloud storage.

The good news is that Mathews also says “the CudaDrive engineering team will be joining forces with the Barracuda Backup team to accelerate the key initiatives for that product line.” So no pink slips, for now, as the company feels “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.”

Corporate blogs always deserve some parsing and beyond the fact the company has put itself up for sale, a fine place to start our effort on this one is with our very own Chris Mellor's interview with Barracuda CEO William “BJ” Jenkins from May 2015. In that chat, BJ told Mellor that “Our storage product offerings are consolidated in data protection and the cloud” and that it saw potential for services like disaster-recovery-as-a-service.

Closing CudaDrive and Copy.com is therefore something of a reversal, but also confirmation that Barracuda's plans did not survive contact with the enemy.

Both services will disappear as of May 1st, 2016. The company's migration guide suggests using mover.io to get the job done.

Barracuda's not the only company to close a storage cloud or to struggle with an attempt to grow a cloudy business. LaCie killed off its Wuala service last April while AVG discontinued its AVG's remote access offering. Dyn's free dynamic DNS was discontinued. the cloud may be a land of opportunity, but clearly there's also opportunity to fail. ®