Juniper Networks unveils Distributed Security Services Architecture

Unified security management integrated with best-in-class routing, firewalling and AI-predictive threat prevention to deliver essential security capabilities to the modern data centre.

  • Thursday, 19th October 2023 Posted 1 year ago in by Phil Alsop

Juniper Networks has announced the expansion of its Connected Security portfolio with new products and capabilities that empower organizations to seamlessly extend security services and Zero Trust policies across distributed data center environments. The new Juniper Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture uniquely integrates Juniper’s unified security management paradigm with best-in-class routing and AI-predictive threat prevention to bring much-needed operational simplicity and scale to data center security. In addition, four new high-performance firewall platforms deliver unmatched performance in a compact footprint that minimizes cost, space and power consumption.

With the adoption of edge computing, multicloud, 5G and IoT, business data is increasingly distributed across geographically dispersed locations, making it harder to secure and manage. To adapt to this changing environment, organizations need a new modern data center architecture that delivers reliability through automated data center operations, scalable performance to support the most stringent workloads (e.g., AI model training) and comprehensive data security, regardless of where the data resides.

The newest enhancements to Juniper’s Connected Security portfolio provide a secure bridge for customers to facilitate their transition to a modern data center, at their own pace. This is achieved via the following unique innovations:

• Juniper’s Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture: Juniper is the first in the industry to deliver an architecture design that fully decouples the forwarding and security services layers that have traditionally been combined in a single firewall appliance. By decoupling these layers, customers can utilize their existing Juniper MX series routers as an intelligent forwarding engine and load balancer. This unique design gives customers independent scaling flexibility without chassis limitations, multi-path resiliency and cost efficiency. When coupled with Juniper Security Director Cloud, the operational experience is as simple as managing one logical element, regardless of the quantities and form factors of any additional firewall engines added to the architecture.

• AI-predictive threat prevention: Building on Juniper’s Adaptive Threat Profiling and Encrypted Traffic Insights, AI-predictive threat prevention automatically generates custom signatures unique to the customer’s environment through a proxy-less architecture. Coupled with AI, customers gain even more effective malware prevention at line rate. Additionally, the enhanced URL filtering solution provides more granular control, with more than 200 categories to choose from and support for up to 200 languages, as well as a new portal for better insights on web content and easy recategorization. The AI-powered security solution enables customers and partners to predict and find real threats faster, leaving human experts to focus on more strategic security tasks.

• Four new best-in-class high-performance firewalls: The new Juniper Networks SRX firewalls (SRX1600, SRX2300, SRX4300, SRX4700) are 1RU in size, scale up to 1.4 Tbps and include built-in Zero Trust capabilities, delivering the industry’s highest firewall throughput performance per rack unit. The new platforms feature wire-speed MACsec along with natively embedded TPM 2.0 chips and cryptographically signed device IDs that allow security administrators and network operators to easily verify the trust posture of devices remotely and mitigate the risks of supply chain attacks. These new firewalls, like the whole SRX family, support industry-standard EVPN-VXLAN Type 5 integration, providing full fabric awareness to security operators and allowing them to respond to threats faster.

When combined with Juniper’s Connected Security Distributed Services Architecture, these additions to the Juniper SRX series family offer customers even more options to build and expand their data center architectures securely and with sustainability objectives top of mind.