Juniper Networks offers path to ease SASE transition

Advancing the momentum in take-up of secure access service edge (SASE) by distributed artificial intelligence (AI)-driven networks, Juniper Networks has announced that it is continuing its investment in the area by introducing Juniper Security Director Cloud.

The company says that technology disruptors, such as 5G and an increasingly distributed workforce, are changing how organisations do business and architect their networks. The result is that enterprises, as well as cloud and service providers, are shifting from monolithic centralised datacentre architectures to SASE, decentralised architectures that bring services closer to end-users around the globe. 

Juniper says its Security Director Cloud bridges organisations’ current security deployments with their future SASE roll-outs by providing security that is managed anywhere and everywhere, on-premise and in the cloud, from the cloud. In addition to distribution connectivity and security services to site users and applications, the cloud-based portal also manages customers’ SASE transformations.

The solution uses experience-led management to attempt to facilitate network transformation, with the reduced overheads inherent in architectural shifts and distributed security delivery. It features zero-touch provisioning and configuration wizards for secure connectivity, and threat prevention for both on-premise and cloud-based security policy.

A multidirectional sync between cloud-hosted and on-premise management and individual firewalls is designed to provide a management experience that supports the transition to a SASE architecture.

The technology also allows for unified policies across physical, virtual and cloud-based security. Polices can be created to include 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 apply them automatically.

Juniper argues that such a unified policy construct across traditional and cloud-delivered security vehicles minimises operational overhead that is otherwise required to recreate policies from one platform to another and decreases attack vectors inadvertently created by human error.

Jason Philp, director of infrastructure at extended workforce platform provider Beeline, said Juniper understood the challenge that companies such as his faced in securely managing its network across multiple international datacentres over the past year as its workforce became more distributed. “With the Juniper technology, we are able to centralise management in the cloud as we move to SASE,” he said.

“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 to address availability, logging and consistent policy enforcement more effectively.”