Juniper Networks Bets on SASE, Announces Security Director Cloud

Juniper Networks is continuing its investment in the Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) market with the introduction of Juniper® Security Director Cloud, a cloud-based portal that distributes connectivity and security services to sites, users and applications, as well as manages customers’ SASE transformations.

Technology disruptors, such as 5G and an increasingly distributed workforce, are changing how organizations do business and architect their networks. Enterprises, as well as cloud and service providers, are shifting from monolithic centralized data center architectures to SASE, decentralized architectures that bring services closer to end-users around the globe.

Juniper Security Director Cloud bridges organizations’ current security deployments with their future SASE rollouts by providing security that is managed anywhere and everywhere, on-premises and in the cloud, from the cloud. Benefits include:

Experience-led management to facilitate network transformation. Security Director Cloud delivers a transformational management experience that reduces overhead that is inherent in architectural shifts and distributed security delivery.

It features zero-touch provisioning and intuitive configuration wizards for secure connectivity, content security and advanced threat prevention for both on-premises and cloud-based security policy. In addition, a multi-directional sync between cloud-hosted and on-premises management and individual firewalls provides a cohesive management experience that supports a seamless and secure shift to a SASE architecture.

Unified policies across physical, virtual and cloud-based security. Customers can create security policies — including user- and application-based access, IPS, anti-malware and web security policies — that follow users, devices or applications as they move to new locations, and automatically apply them. This unified policy construct across traditional and cloud-delivered security vehicles minimizes operational overhead otherwise required to recreate policies from one platform to another and decreases attack vectors inadvertently created by human error.

Validated security effectiveness. Juniper provides cyberattack protection that has been validated by objective, third-party testing 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 in the data center. This includes achieving the highest security efficacy rating at 99.5% from Cyberratings.org compared to leading security vendors for Enterprise Firewall, and 100% effectiveness with zero false positives in ICSA Labs’ Advanced Threat Defense test in Q4 of 2021. Security Director Cloud delivers policies empowered with these proven threat prevention technologies, ensuring quick access to applications and consistent security enforcement.

Visibility into threat behaviors across the entire network with Security Director Insights. Security Director Cloud features correlated visibility into attacks across the network by bringing together threat detection information – including detections from other vendors’ products – into an attack timeline, and it enables one-touch mitigation to quickly address gaps in defense.

“Juniper is leading the move into the SASE market with a great management experience, putting our customers and their teams first,” said Samantha Madrid, VP of Security Business & Strategy at Juniper Networks. “With the introduction of Security Director Cloud, we’re able to meet customers where they are as they transition to a SASE architecture by delivering networking and security services from the cloud to sites, users and applications around the world. Security Director Cloud is like ‘iCloud’ for security operators, providing the ‘and’ strategy that enables our enterprise, cloud and service provider customers to transform their networks seamlessly and securely.”

As a security provider, Juniper has gained market momentum with a consistent string of growth and awards, including being named as a Customers’ Choice in the April 2021 Gartner Peer Insights “Voice of the Customer” for Network Firewalls, and by CRN as a Top-20 Coolest Network Security Vendor for the second year in a row. In addition, Juniper experienced double-digit revenue growth in security year-over-year for Q1 of 2021, including growth across all customer verticals. This puts Juniper in a unique position to support customers as they transform their networks and implement a SASE architecture. With the announcement of Security Director Cloud and the recent acquisition of 128 Technology’s Session Smart SD-WAN, Juniper Networks leads the market in successfully converging networking and security, aligning to its Connected Security strategy, effectively supporting both on-premises and distributed workforces and ensuring the best possible experience for all.

“Over the past year, as our workforce became more distributed, securely managing our network across multiple international data centers was a challenge. Juniper gets that challenge and, with Security Director Cloud, we are able to centralize management in the cloud as we move to SASE. Now, we can support a distributed workforce and my team can secure all our locations, users and applications without having to jump through a bunch of hoops. The unified security management solution also helps us address availability, logging and consistent policy enforcement more effectively,” commented, Jason Philp, Director of Infrastructure at Beeline.

“Juniper Connected Security coming together with Session Smart technology is excellent news for our business. Having started our Juniper journey with 128 Technology, we are happily looking forward to adding their full SASE capabilities to our offering, with both validated security efficacy and AI-driven SD-WAN, that allow us to best facilitate our customers’ network transformations,” expressed, Mark Marquez, EVP of Technology at Momentum Telecom.