With the push toward hybridization, Juniper Contrail Security helps secure applications running on multiple clouds
Juniper Networks, an American multinational corporation for networking products, unveiled Juniper Contrail Security today, a security and micro segmentation solution created to safeguard applications running on multi-cloud environments.
More and more companies are deploying cloud-native applications on hybrid-cloud architecture, which provides the flexibility to fulfill the demands of multiple locations with the latest software-defined networking (SDN) technologies. According to a study by Forbes, hybrid cloud adoption has increased three time over within the last year, swelling from 19% to 57% among 2,009 organizations surveyed. Unfortunately, as the distribution of applications across multiple cloud environments grows, so does the threat of security breaches. Juniper Contrail Security was designed to provide distributed security to these cloud-native applications.
The components that make up Juniper Contrail Security were not designed from scratch, however. They were leveraged from a pre-existing product known as Contrail Networking, a SDN platform based on an open-source networking virtualization project called OpenContrail. What makes Juniper Contrail Security unique is it helps reduce the threat of security breaches using three key pillars: application traffic visibility and advanced analytics, consistent intent-driven policy, and multiple enforcement points.
Application traffic visibility and advanced analytics provides orchestration across a hybrid cloud environment. They shed light on application traffic — how the applications interact — with the use of machine learning.
Consistent driven policies allows operators to enforce policies across multiple environments. “What we provide is what we call consistent,” explained Pratik Roychowdhury, senior director of product management, Contrail at Juniper Networks, “meaning once you define a policy in one environment and want to apply that same policy in a different environment, you do not need to rewrite it, so it is consistent across environments.” If, for example, a user wants to move an application running in a Devon environment to staging and production, the application policies do not need to be rewritten for each environment.
Multiple enforcement points use policies to defend and shield applications from security threats. Whenever a policy is defined, a policy framework communicates with an enforcement point to enforce the policy. Juniper Contrail Security uses virtual firewalls to provide enhanced security services and to protect companies.
Juniper Networks isn’t the only company offering security tools with the push toward hybrid clouds, however. This week, for instance, VMware announced a new security feature called App Defense, which protects applications running on VMware vSphere-based virtualization products and cloud environments. The company says the solution will provide security teams with the visibility and traction needed to collaborate with application developers to maintain security of enterprise systems.
