Juniper launches new security suite for cloud security challenges

Juniper Networks, a industry leader in network innovation, recently unveiled Firefly Suite, a virtualised security portfolio that provides granular, dynamic and secure connectivity for the private and public cloud. The suite introduces Firefly Perimeter, a virtual version of the Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateway, as well as Junos Space Virtual Director, an application that automates the management and deployment of Firefly Perimeter. When combined with enhancements to Firefly Host, which provides hypervisor-based protection between virtual machines, the suite secures traffic within a virtualised data center as well as traffic to and from it.

“IT leaders have been seeking innovative solutions to secure both the infrastructure and data that can keep up with the rigorous demands of their business and leverage the cloud in a smart and evolutionary way. Juniper’s Firefly Suite allows companies to attach, create and manage security policy across physical and virtual firewalls with a high level of flexibility supporting error-free, fast scale out deployment for the most demanding environments. We provide complete protection for the cloud and from the cloud,” Michael Callahan, vice president global product marketing, Security Business Unit, Juniper Networks.

IT and security professionals are continually looking to deliver the benefits of virtualisation and cloud technologies without undermining security. This requires finding ways to provide robust and granular protection for virtual machines (VM) that can meet the specific security requirements of different workloads, while also being deployed as quickly as a VM instance can be created. The Firefly Suite proactively protects virtual workloads and applications in real-time with security intelligence, automation and comprehensive control, enabling organisations to securely leverage these new cloud computing technologies.

Juniper Networks Firefly Suite can be easily embedded throughout the virtual environment including the hypervisor itself or as VMs connected to the various virtual networks, to provide tailored security, automation and control. This approach accelerates service rollout and increases application agility with granular protection that is highly scalable.  Administrators will benefit from the rich automation capabilities supporting error-free deployment and unified management making it easy to create, attach and change security policies consistently across the network.

The Firefly Virtual Security Suite includes three major components:

Firefly Perimeter

• Juniper is introducing Firefly Perimeter, a new virtual and software-based version of the Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateway.

• Firefly Perimeter delivers high availability, granular security with segmentation capabilities between zones, organisations, lines of business and applications, as well as rich connectivity features like Network Address Translation (NAT), routing and VPN.  Firefly Perimeter can be easily deployed and managed centrally or individually as a security VM for each department, application or tenant.

• Juniper Networks Contrail seamlessly integrates with Juniper’s flagship virtual firewall, Firefly Perimeter, to dynamically provision service-chained virtual and physical security services in cloud environments, which is the first of many Juniper SDN-enabled NFV security services that provides unparalleled performance, scale and coverage across virtualised data centers for enterprises and service providers.

Junos Space Virtual Director

• Also new with this release is Virtual Director, a new Junos Space application delivering full lifecycle management of Firefly Perimeter VMs.

• Junos Space Virtual Director is a lifecycle management application that enables organisations to automate provisioning and resource allocation of virtual machines associated with Firefly Perimeter VMs.

• This includes easy-to-navigate and intuitive user interface with task-oriented workflows, pre- tested configuration, open APIs for integration with third-party management platforms.

 

Firefly Host

• Firefly Host, formerly named vGW Virtual Gateway, is a purpose-built firewall for virtualisation designed to protect intra-VM traffic.

• Firefly Host provides hypervisor-based stateful firewall for East-West traffic between virtual machines, including integrated intrusion detection (IDS), virtualisation-specific antivirus (AV) protection and compliance tools, with management scale.

• Firefly Host is tightly integrated into the VMware hypervisor and VMware management framework.

• Synchronisation of security policies across Firefly Host management centers provides automated policy management and granular control of VMs for multi-tenant environments with unparalleled performance in the industry.

“With Juniper’s Firefly Security Suite, we can rapidly onboard new tenants by provisioning virtual firewalls instead of the typical 30-60 days onboard cycle for dedicated physical hardware. We can now move from the design limitations of a monolithic architecture to diversified firewall implementation despite the shared public cloud environment. We are able to offer rapid disaster recovery, personalised log information and more importantly a portal to our customers for self-service management,”  said Brian Gubish, product development architect, Expedient.