Juniper Networks’ Cloud-Based Secure Edge Will Help Enterprises Grow Into SASE

Cloud-delivered Juniper Secure Edge, a different vehicle than the Juniper SRX firewall series, will help businesses manage their security environments across a hybrid workforce and transition to SASE, the company said.

Juniper Networks is building on its secure access service edge (SASE) architecture with an offering aimed at collapsing security into one user interface that can be managed from the cloud.

Juniper Secure Edge is a cloud-delivered security service that offers Firewall-as-a-Service (FWaaS) as a single-stack software architecture that lets businesses, all the way from enterprise to the midmarket and smaller, transition to SASE and scale their security profiles as they grow, said Kate Adam, senior director of security product marketing for Juniper Networks.

At its core, Secure edge is a different delivery vehicle for all of the same threat protection and firewalling features that customers have come to love from Juniper SRX series. But because it’s entirely cloud-managed, Juniper Secure Edge will help businesses manage their security environments across a hybrid workforce, Adam said.

“The remote workforce is here to stay, so it’s incumbent upon us to protect users both on and off the network consistently,” she said. On the operations side, customers are increasingly moving towards SASE, but any architectural change is difficult. “With Secure Edge, we’ve done our best to make that transition and migration as easy and seamless as possible,” she added.

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That transition is being made easier because Secure Edge is managed by Security Director Cloud, a centralized connectivity and security management platform for enterprises and channel partners introduced in 2021 that the company said can help businesses adopt a SASE architecture on their own timeline and create policies that can follow users and applications, regardless of their location.

Juniper Secure Edge gives users with reliable and secure access to their applications and security resources, including Dynamic Zero Trust segmentation. The offering lets companies manage and maintain their security policies from one place and grants users secure access, regardless of if they are working from the office, at home, or on the road.

“[Users] don’t have to recreate rule sets or copy them over, and they don’t need to toggle between managing their more traditional on-premises security deployments and their cloud-delivered security deployments,” Adam said. “That helps that migration to SASE become a lot smoother and less chaotic.”

Secure Edge can work with the identity provider that a customer may already have in place, such as Azure AD and Okta, to protect their existing investments. Businesses can also connect their SD-WAN tools into Secure Edge, Adam said. “We want to be very mindful, and we don’t want [customers] to have to replace components of their stack. If something is working for them, they should use it. But they can leverage Secure Edge to bolster their security for those branch remote users, as well as their campus and headquarters,” she said.

Secure Edge can integrate into a customer’s existing tech stack, making it a convenient security add-on for any channel partner helping customers address new challenges or growing quickly. It can also boost the operational efficiency of an MSP, Adam said.

Juniper customers can use the physical, virtual, containerized and now, cloud-delivered, features that a Juniper SRX firewall offers and managed through Security Director Cloud. This gives partners and in-house IT teams full visibility and consistent security across both the edge and the data center locations and from one user interface, according to the Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company.

“Businesses have all of these features and goodies in a single software stack — we’re not service-chaining different technologies together,” Adam added.