Juniper today announced that it is pursuing the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market with the unveiling of its Security Director Cloud portal that encompasses access to both network and security services wherever a customer needs them, as well as management of customers’ ongoing SASE transformations.
Kate Adam, senior director of security product marketing at Juniper, told Fierce Telecom, “We’re moving into the SASE space, but we’re doing it a little differently. The trajectory of SASE has been crazy. But for customers this is a transformation that will take a long time, at least 18 months if not a few years. Security Director Cloud will help them unify management of their traditional networking and security deployments, as well as their transition to a new SASE environment.”
The new portal solution proposes to offer managed security both on-premises and in the cloud with multi-directional synchronization between cloud-hosted and on-premises management, as well as zero-touch provisioning and intuitive configuration wizards for secure connectivity, content security and advanced threat prevention.
It also can enable unified policies across physical, virtual and cloud-based security, including user-based and application-based access, IPS, anti-malware and web security policies, that follow and automatically apply to users, devices or applications as they move to new locations.
“A lot of vendors in the SASE space have focused everything on the edge, and people say the perimeter has disappeared,” Adam said. “But the perimeter is an amoeba. It’s wherever your apps are. Security is not just a data center problem or an edge problem. That’s why Security Director Cloud provides policies that follow the apps.”
In addition to security policy flexibility, Juniper is providing cyberattack protection that it said has proven by third-party testing programs to be more than 99% effective against network and application exploits, new and commodity malware, IoT botnets and other attack techniques targeted at the edge and data center. One of these programs was ICSA Labs’ Advanced Threat Defense test, in which Juniper rated as 100% effective with zero false positives, Adam said.
Security Director Cloud also includes Security Director Insights, which offers visibility into potential security threats by correlating threat detection from Juniper and from other vendors’ products to create a comprehensive attack timeline, and a mitigation action to be taken to cover security weaknesses.
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Juniper’s announcement comes two years after research firm Gartner coined the term SASE to encompass convergence of decentralized networking, services and security around the network edge and away from the data center. Adam said Juniper already was moving in this direction prior to this announcement by taking actions such as adding threat intelligence features to its routing portfolio and using switches to detect and quarantine end points under attack. The company also acquired 128 Technology last year, bringing a session-smart SD-WAN element into its overall networking and security convergence.