Juniper takes SASE security control to the cloud

Juniper Networks has laid a key part of its Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) foundation with a cloud-based security-control service that provides a central way to control and protect on-premises or cloud-based enterprise resources.

Called Security Director Cloud, the service focuses Juniper’s SASE efforts by providing a central point to manage enterprise security services including policy setting, and threat-detection and -prevention.

Juniper (like other key enterprise networking vendors such as Cisco, Hewlitt-Packard Enterprise (Aruba) and VMware, as well as service providers including Cato Networks, Akamai, and Zscaler) has pledged allegiance to growing SASE support in its product families.

Juniper already has a variety of security products under its Connected Security architecture to contribute to a SASE offering. 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. Juniper is also moving  to build artificial intelligence into its security gear as well as its MX Series routers, and its EX and QFX Series switches. 

In addition, Juniper has intelligent SD-WAN technology it acquired from 128 Technology in December for $450 million. 128’s Session Smart software promises to reduce the costs of running SD-WAN and WANs by making intelligent routing decisions based on sessions and application needs over individual traditional tunnels.

With Security Director Cloud, the idea is to create security policies once and extended them to any user, device, and application regardless of location changes, said Kate Adam, senior director, security product marketing at Juniper Networks. That way customers can develop a unified security policy that can be delivered across traditional and cloud-delivered resources.

“It takes the security headache out of operations that may have created a blind spot as they move distributed apps around,” Adam said.

Juniper’s services are designed to perform in-depth analysis, custom reporting and provide recommendations on security exposure and security policies to help customers mitigate risks, maintain business agility and reduce operational costs, she said.

Once dialed-up, 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, Adam said.

The platform includes Security Director Insights, which correlates attack details with threat intelligence–including attack information from other vendors’ products–to update security policies automatically, taking manual integration of of security, Adam said.

Security Director Cloud will be available at the end of the month.