Juniper Security Director Cloud Lets Enterprises ‘Manage Transition’ To SASE

Juniper’s new Security Director Cloud platform can ‘really reducing the gap that can arise when you do an architectural transformation,’ Juniper’s security VP Samantha Madrid tells CRN.

After a year of new IT requirements driven by a move to the cloud and the remote working trend, Juniper Networks is helping enterprises secure access and ensure users, applications, and infrastructure remain protected, no matter where the users are located.

The networking giant on Wednesday introduced a centralized connectivity and security management platform for enterprises and channel partners: Security Director Cloud. The new platform will help businesses adopt a Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) architecture on their own timeline and create policies that can follow users and applications, regardless of their location, according to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.

“We’ve built [Security Director Cloud] out as a cloud-native offering that enables customers not only to support their existing security infrastructure with Juniper, but also to take advantage of cloud delivery as well [for] managing those policies,” said Samantha Madrid, vice president of security business and strategy for Juniper.

[Related: Juniper Networks’ Rami Rahim: ‘It Won’t Be Long Before Enterprise Is Our Largest Vertical’]

Multi-cloud environments require a robust management portal, said Mark Sollazo, CEO and co-founder of SynerComm Inc., an Elite Juniper partner.

SynerComm, a 31-year-old Brookfield, Wis.-based security-focused solution provider, works with many clients that purposely use multiple cloud providers for their hybrid cloud strategies, which include a mix of public and private clouds.

“We do see a lot of movement into a very diverse, hybrid cloud environment, but then [customers] don’t know how to handle that, especially when it comes time to securing it,” Sollazo said. Customers often struggle with knowing where their or their channel partners’ security responsibility ends and where the public cloud provider’s begins, or how to audit hybrid environments, he added.

The “cherry on top” of Security Director Cloud is that it lets enterprise automatically apply existing security policies, whether they‘re for users, applications, or infrastructure, to cloud environments. “If I make a change, or if I add on a different retail location, [as an example,] it will automatically inherit those policies,” Madrid said. “It’s really reducing the gap that can arise when you do an architectural transformation.”

Security Director Cloud is interoperable with third-party networking and security technologies via APIs. Security Director Cloud Insights is a feature that can bump up visibility into attacks across the network by bringing together threat detection information from other vendors’ products, according to Juniper Networks.

The latest platform gives Juniper an edge, Madrid said, because it can offer unified policy management across physical, virtual and cloud-based security technologies. “We are removing that [management] burden, by making it very, very easy to manage, and consistent with what enterprises already have,” she said.

Juniper Networks CEO Rami Rahim told CRN in April that security was one of the most important tech areas in which partners should be investing. The company posted double-digit security growth during its Q1 2021, with the segment growing 11 percent to $163 million year over year.

The new platform will be instrumental for channel partners helping their customers move to a SASE, or connected security approach for protecting their entire IT environment, Madrid said.

“From a partner standpoint, not only can they manage the transition to SASE, but they can manage that transition, not just with Juniper technologies, but other technologies they have in the customer’s environment and their practice.”