Juniper: Enterprise Consolidation Needs Dynamic Security

Juniper Networks is taking on Cisco in networking security, advocating a holistic strategy that secures devices and applications, as well as the network.

Earlier this year, Juniper announced a new dynamic security model for protecting data centre infrastructure. The model, built on the SRX Series appliance and Junos operating system platform, is intended to guard against threats specifically aimed at virtualised environments, Web 2.0 applications and large cloud computing deployments.

Consolidation and security

The main thing driving this security trend is enterprise consolidation, according to Karim Toubba, Juniper’s vice president of marketing for service layer technology told eWEEK Europe at an analyst event in San Francisco last week.

“Everybody you talk to today has a consolidation project, and that has a profound impact on the underlying security infrastructure,” he said. “It’s turning the paradigm of security upside down.”

According to Toubba, the advent of virtualisation and consolidation means that data not only needs to be protected as it moves from physical machine to physical machine, but also as it moves between virtual machines within the same box.

“One of the biggest challenges is around scale, because you’re no longer just moving data as applications talk to each other but you’re also moving VM workloads, which creates a huge amount of bandwidth,” he said. Networking vendors need to enable a security infrastructure that not only scales, but also moves beyond the classic layer three security of looking at the IP source and destination, and looks at the context of the virtual machine.

“Security is at a point of inflection,” said Toubba. “We believe that organisations need to think much more about embedding security across the stack systematically, which will give the security guys a completely different position within organisations but also will build a broader architecture that will enable them to deal with a lot of threats.”

“We are firm believers that the holistic or layered approach is really the way to approach today’s security challenges,” he added.