Juniper launches security solutions for the cloud

Juniper Networks has announced the integration of its new Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway with the Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways to provide a consistent, virtualisation-aware solution for private and public cloud deployments. This milestone marks the first step with Juniper’s acquisition of Altor in December 2010 in a multi-phased strategy to combine best-in-class products for both physical and virtual network environments and provide a comprehensive, automated approach for data center security.

Prior to the acquisition, Juniper and Altor partnered for several years to bring deep expertise to a dynamic threat landscape that requires enterprises to push beyond purely physical security layers. The Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway is a first-of-its-kind product that offers organisations access to robust, comprehensive security optimised for high performance, flexibility and scale in virtualised environments.

With security and trust as primary concerns in enterprise cloud adoption, Juniper’s integrated solution enables a secure enterprise architecture through the isolation of virtual machines (VMs) and visibility into VM traffic layers. This differentiated approach enables comprehensive security and assurance that multiple VMs within a virtualised environment remain secure and isolated. Additionally, vGW security automation simplifies corporate and regulatory compliance oversight by regulating the creation and movement of VMs virtual environments.

“Enterprises building private clouds and public cloud service providers need a security solution that is consistent and pervasive across the physical and the virtualized network infrastructure,” said Douglas Murray, senior vice president and general manager, security business unit, at Juniper Networks. “The integrated SRX plus vGW solution ensures that security is maintained and enforced right down to each individual VM, while enhancing the operational efficiency of security management.”

Juniper’s SRX-vGW integration offers organisations visibility into virtualised environments by having the vGW automatically populate VM membership into Juniper SRX Zones. Key SRX-vGW benefits include  zone-based smart policy groups that are automatically created on the hypervisor, automated security classification and enforcement for new or cloned VMs, automated VM compliance assessment based on multiple VM attributes and quarantine of non-compliant VMs to eliminate administrative errors and reduce risk.

“As organisations continue to virtualise their data centres, workloads of higher sensitivity are being virtualised and the workloads themselves are becoming more mobile, challenging traditional data centre security architectures which rely solely on physical appliance-based enforcement,” said Neil MacDonald, vice president and Gartner Fellow at Gartner. “It’s critical to implement a consistent way of defining and managing security policies across physical and virtual machines and delivering virtualisation-awareness to security policy enforcement points, to reduce the complexity of administration.”