Juniper Introduces Virtualized Security for Private and Public Clouds

Juniper Networks today announced the integration of its new Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway with the Juniper Networks SRX Series Services Gateways to provide a consistent, virtualization-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 organizations access to robust, comprehensive security optimized for high performance, flexibility and scale in virtualized 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 virtualized 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 organizations visibility into virtualized 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;
* Quarantine of non-compliant VMs to eliminate administrative errors and reduce risk.

“As organizations continue to virtualize their data centers, workloads of higher sensitivity are being virtualized and the workloads themselves are becoming more mobile, challenging traditional data center 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 virtualization-awareness to security policy enforcement points, to reduce the complexity of administration.”
Availability

The Juniper Networks vGW Virtual Gateway is available now and Juniper will be showcasing live demonstrations of the SRX-vGW product integration at RSA 2011 in the Juniper Networks booth #1745. The most comprehensive forum on information security for both enterprise and technical professionals, RSA is being held February 14-18, 2011 in San Francisco.