Juniper: Enterprise Consolidation Needs Dynamic Security
Data centre consolidation is increasing the pressure on security infrastructure, says Juniper’s Karim Toubba
Mobile security
This is particularly relevant in the world of mobile security – an area which Juniper only moved into fairly recently, with its acquisition of SMobile Systems, a provider of security solutions for smartphones and tablets.
“If you look at any attack today in the world of security there’s the attacker, there’s the type of threat that the attacker is using to access the information or systems, and there’s the target. What we’re seeing is fundamental changes in each of those areas,” said Toubba.
He explained that the mobile revolution means that people are accessing a number of different networks every day – from secure enterprise networks to public Wi-Fi hotspots – and attackers understand that there is a varying degree of security on those different networks.
“There’s no way that we’re going to guarantee the consistency of security over all those networks,” he said. “If they can attack me in my profile when my defences are down and inject malware or some kind of malicious software onto my device, I simply take my device, walk into the network, turn it on, and they bypass a myriad of security technologies and capabilities.
“This is one of the fundamental shifts that we will continue to see and tied to a change in how they’re targeting the users.”
Web 2.0 means Risks 2.0
Toubba also said that attackers are increasingly targeting Web 2.0 applications, where they can exploit a “trust relationship” online. He cited the recent ‘Here you have’ worm, which effectively disabled the user’s antivirus software, as an illustration of the “future of security”.
“The future of security is not about a point solution, it’s about an architecture,” he said. “You can’t have AV only in the cloud or in the network, you can’t have AV only on the client. You have to think about an antivirus and a hardware strategy and architecture, from the network, to the application, all the way through to the device.”
Toubba said that Juniper’s focus on the network going forward will be two-prong. Firstly it will focus on upgrading its mobile infrastructure to help it increase its market presence. Secondly it will aim to bridge the physical and virtual world inside the data centre in order to address new performance and scale needs.
