Juniper adds security upgrades for SASE, security management

Juniper Networks has added firewall-as-a-service, policy, and segmentation features to its cloud-based security family that lets enterprise customers control and protect on-premises or cloud-based resources.

The new Juniper Secure Edge package expands and strengthens brings key enterprise security features to Juniper’s core cloud-based management platform Security Director Cloud, but also bolsters the vendor’s secure access service edge (SASE) strategy.  

Security Director Cloud learns customers’ policies and configurations and syncs them with on-prem firewalls. It includes zero-touch provisioning and configuration wizards for secure connectivity, content security and advanced threat prevention. It also includes Security Director Insights, which correlates attack details with threat intelligence—including attack information gathered from other vendors’ products—to update security policies automatically.

To that, the Secure Edge package adds unified policy management that lets customers create policies once and apply them to applications and users regardless of where they reside in the enterprise—in a campus, branch, or home.

Security policies follow the user wherever they go, protecting users, devices, and applications without having to copy over or recreate rule sets, Juniper stated.

“Juniper Secure Edge includes application identification, intrusion prevention, malware detection and full web proxy and filtering and advanced threat protection, all delivered without having to inspect traffic multiple times or pass it off to adjacent threat protection services,” wrote Samantha Madrid vice president of product management with the  Security Business & Strategy group at Juniper in a blog.

Secure Edge also will integrate with identity providers such as Azure AD, Okta, and others through it support of security assertion mkup language (SAML) 2.0.

“Secure Edge makes it easy to deploy cloud-delivered application control, content filtering and effective threat prevention without breaking visibility or security enforcement,” Madrid wrote.

Security Director Cloud and Secure Edge are meant to ease enterprises’ migration to a SASE environment, Madrid stated. “With the right security architecture, including unbroken visibility from client to workload, security assurance and a single policy framework, organizations can leverage their existing security investments while also transitioning to a SASE architecture,” Madrid wrote.

Juniper already has a variety of security products under its overarching Connected Security architecture that support its SASE offerings. For example, its cloud-based Advanced Threat Prevention (ATP), offers advanced malware protection. Juniper SRX and vSRX firewalls offer remote configuration and security, networking and application policy monitoring.