In an attempt to understand better Juniper’s vision and strategy for Indian market, we recently interviewed Sandeep Shelke, Head—Systems Engineering Enterprise, Juniper Networks. In this interview, he has unleashed Juniper’s security thrust, expertise and future planning for this sub-continental market.

Sandeep Shelke, Head—Systems Engineering Enterprise, Juniper Networks

Q1. Currently where is major thrust from Juniper in security arena?

Enterprises are interconnecting more with each other, with customers, with vendors, with government agencies, and with the public. The result is a new universe of network security threats. Modern Network security threats being driven primarily by

• Increasing complexity and distribution of networks

• Increasing sophistication of Applications

• Financial incentives motivating criminal behavior

A major problem that the enterprises face is of justifying budgetary allocations for security in their organizations. A majority of them were not ready to put in extra investment towards security strategies. Many also do not consider security as part of their enterprise function. This is creating a platform for hackers and for security breaches. Managed Security Providers will increase the coverage they give to customers and their business will grow. It’s a cost effective way to get security, and because not all organizations will have expertise in-house to deal with the variety of threats and issues.

Just as security architecture is being absorbed throughout enterprise-wide systems, the variety of expertise required to manage security at different levels is going to drive organizational change. While this will take different forms in different organizations, there’s no doubt that the degree of specialization needed in various areas of security is increasing, so more cross-functional positions will be created.

With servers and processors becoming increasingly powerful, architectures will change to allow for several applications to run on virtual machines on the same hardware server. This turns network traffic into host traffic, and will render many network-based tools useless in such environments. Backed by a green agenda of power consumption savings as well as reduced costs, this is too compelling for it not to start happening.

Q2. How did you asses the year 2008 in terms of security threats and how do you predict the year 2009?

The overall network security market in India is expected to grow at a CAGR of 25 percent till 2010. The Information Security market in Asia Pacific was worth about $420 million in 2006, and APRG predicts it will grow to nearly $1.1 billion by 2012. The market for Information Security consulting in India will grow 23 percent annually through 2012 driven as strategies to integrate enterprise-wide security are implemented. 62 percent of network security revenues come from the IT, ITeS and BFSI sectors.

Q3. How effectively can Juniper manage security threat response?

Juniper provides innovative and market-leading security technologies throughout the network that can mitigate the risks associated with connecting and delivering critical network services and business applications. These security products provide network-level and application-level awareness to enable more intelligent and timely security decisions. Built-in resiliency and reliability capabilities ensure highly available network operations.

Integrated Firewall/IPSec VPN: Juniper’s Firewall/IPSec VPN security products are purpose built to perform essential security functions. These integrated products combine a Stateful Inspection firewall with Deep Inspection technology for application-level protection.

SSL VPN: Juniper’s SSL VPNs enable organizations to cost-effectively extend secure access to
mobile employees, partners and customers by providing granular user-based and group-based
access control of both application and full network resources. SSL VPNs eliminate the need for
client software deployment, changes to internal servers, and costly ongoing client maintenance
and desktop support.

Intrusion Prevention: Juniper’s Intrusion Detection and Prevention (IDP) products integrate application and network visibility with incident investigation and remediation, helping customers to quickly and proactively deploy inline attack prevention. When deployed inline, IDP effectively identifies and stops network and application-level attacks before they inflict any damage, minimizing the time and costs associated with intrusions.

Access Control: Juniper’s Unified Access Control (UAC) solutions combine user identity and device security state information with network location information to create a unique access control policy for each user.

This comprehensive suite of products is an important component of uniform security policy enforcement across all network access methods, including WLAN, remote/VPN, dial and identity-based (wired 802.1X).

Q4. Securing branch networks has become a priority for almost all organizations. How can Juniper address that market?

We observe two types of demands from the operators:

A) Router Security Assessment service: we identify security vulnerabilities in the router infrastructure, recommend industry best practices and discuss current attacks, patterns and exploits.

B) 1. Protection of their telecom infrastructure: traditionally protection against attacks like DDoS.

2. Providing a secure/clean internet services to its subscribers: it has been observed there is a lot of Virus related threats from the unprotected Subscriber PC’s that gets onto the telecom network.

3. With the increasing threat perception and the recent terrorists attack, there is renewed thrust to not only secure the network infrastructure and provide clean services but also catch the rogue users and have the capability to do the forensic analysis later.

Q5. Emerging threats are more sophisticated and complicated and it is proven as most of current solutions in access control have been compromised. How strong is Juniper's solution in this area and if any loophole is found, how fast Juniper can address it?

Enterprises would be dedicating huge resources to manage individual security appliances. IT staff would need to be trained on each user interface, with commands and settings different between devices. It is imperative that a company deploy a proven, reputable solution instead of a UTM device that has all the right marketing keywords on the package. A UTM system is only part of a total security infrastructure.

A UTM device is defined as a firewall with extra protection features to avert DoS / DDoS, viruses and other malicious programs, spam mail and phishing attacks. Web filtering (blocking unauthorized addresses) may also be featured. Before the current UTM “revolution,” enterprises deployed multiple security software programs, including a firewall, anti-virus software, anti-spam appliance and URL gateway. These programs and devices have their specific purposes but implementing so many separate systems is not cost effective.

Q6. Single console management is nowadays a highly appreciated feature in most of integrated security solutions. How do you address this issue? Brief us also your future plan for India.

As per various analyst reports, the highest concern area for CIO/CTO is security. As market moves towards an extended enterprise, security becomes critical aspect of network rollout planning. Also the proliferation of mobile workers and the blurring of the perimeter between internal (trusted) and external (untrusted) users, aspects such as Access control have gained importance due to need for protecting business critical information and also ensuring uptime.

2008 witnessed more interest in integrated security solutions. While there is still demand for more comprehensive solutions, customers are seeing the benefits of a Unified Threat Management (UTM) approach to streamline their security stance. Unified Access Control (UAC) is also another major highlight.

Unified threat management has been in demand; the distributed branches of regional companies want a simplified, one-stop solution to thwart multiple threat types without the complexities of many point products. UTM reduces IT administrative overhead, allowing the IT department to focus on a single management interface. This optimizes training and troubleshooting. Unified access control is one of the major applications which will take of in 2008, because the Internet has become the de facto access method for both internal and external resources, access now requires a central control point to better manage security and deployment for different user groups and types.

—By: 'InfoSecurity' Bureau.