Tag Archives: Wireless

iPad mini winner announced!

Posted on by
Reply

Meet Janusz Naks, Information Security Manager and winner of our iPad mini prize draw at JanuszIPadmini3BLOGCloud Expo Europe. Janusz was a visitor to our stand at the event in January 2013 where we launched Cloudutils, our range of cloud services.

‘I’m thrilled to have won the iPad mini, it came as an unexpected but very welcome surprise! In the higher education sector we are looking at BYOD as part of on-going strategy. In HE students, staff & visiting lecturers are already using tablets, laptops, and smart phones, as are some of the IT team, so winning the iPad mini will support our BYOD initiatives and will be instrumental in defining policies aimed at securing the BYOD environment. I am sure that the iPad will become an essential working tool for me day to day. Thanks Netutils!’

 We will be keeping in touch with Janusz to find out how he’s getting on. In the meantime many congratulations from all the team here at Netutils. (And no… we’re not jealous .. well, maybe a little bit.)

WEBINAR Recording: Guest Access, Made Easy

Posted on by
Reply

The rise of user expectations for anytime, anywhere wireless access places increasing pressures on the IT team. To meet this demand today’s organisations are required to offer guest Wi-Fi services throughout the communal areas of their head and branch offices for visitors, contractors and staff.  If your role includes responsibility for secure guest access then please take a look at our recent popular webinar which introduces our Cloudutils Guest Access solution.

Webinar Recording: Your BYOD Policy Part 2: Performance and Scalability

Posted on by
Reply

Are you concerned with any of the following?

  • Latency & Interference on your network as a result of increased user activity
  • Seamlessly managing the performance of applications that require real time communications – like Microsoft Lync
  • The ability to cost effectively scale and maintain network performance as user demands for access increase

If you are an IT manager or decision maker and identify with one or more of these issues, then please take a look at the recording of our recent webinar. ‘Your BYOD Policy Part 2: Performance & Scalability’. This is the 2nd in our series of webinars covering the Juniper Network’s Simply Connected story. Part 3 will over Reliability & Management and will be held at 11am on Wednesday 16th January 2013. Please register here.

Webinar Recording: Your BYOD Policy Part 1: Provisioning and Security

Posted on by
Reply

Are you concerned with any of the following?

  • Securely authenticating guest & employee owned mobile devices on your wireless network
  • Managing the admin overhead when providing network access to your users & guests
  • Providing mobile network users seamless access to corporate resources
  • Leakage of corporate data, network contamination and lost devices.

Then please take a look at our recent webinar above. This webinar is the 1st in our series of 4 webinars covering the Juniper ‘Simply Connected Story, please keep an eye out for details of parts 2 ,3 & 4 which cover, Performance, Reliability & Management.

You can register for ‘Your BYOD Policy & The Simply Connected Story Part 2: – Performance & Scalability’ by visiting our registration page here.

IPEXPO 2012 – The Big BYOD Questions

Posted on by
Reply

Thanks to everyone who visited us on stand recently at IPEXPO 2012. Unsurprisingly BYOD was a big topic. In this video blog we answer some of the key BYOD questions we were asked on stand covering areas like Mobile Device Management,  user demands for 24/7 connectivity and security. We hope you find it useful.

How CIO’s can fully harness the Enterprise mobility phenomenon

Posted on by
Reply

Guest Blog, from Gilles Trachsel, Product Marketing Manager, Juniper Networks

Two weeks ago I spoke at IP EXPO 2012 – London – where I presented on Enterprise mobility and the security challenges ahead. The following is a summary of the key facts I discussed; at a glance, you have to be able, as an IT manager or executive, to offer more granular control to the users accessing the network, based on who they are, where they are, what application they want to use and from what device, and all this in a controlled and secured way. It’s all about bringing control back to IT.

FACT: The nature of the LAN access will change from wired to wireless Ethernet over the next couple of years. This will be driven in large part by the massive influx of new and highly capable tablets and smart phones which do not have RJ-45 connections.

FACT: The time for enterprise mobility is now. According to IDC, by next year, more than 1.2 billion workers worldwide will be using mobile technology, accounting for 35% of the workforce!

FACT: We can observe a shift from PC based and corporate owned enterprise computing to any mix of devices that are corporate AND personally owned. This creates challenges around security and compliance. The same applies to the applications, where we can see a shift from corporate operated applications to chosen by the user applications. It is again a mix of both – the goal being to gain competitiveness and to bring more productivity.

FACT: The user’s end device is the weakest point in our security today and the attackers know it. The types of attacks are morphing. Today more than 80% of malware uses encryption, compression and file packing evading the traditional security technologies. Smart phones, tablets and cloud services are becoming popular targets for these attacks. Mobility forces enterprises to shift their security strategy away from a perimeter approach, making them realize that borders are now global and that their vulnerabilities are actually internal. Also mobile malwares are becoming pervasive. There are more mobile malwares than ever before, they have gotten smarter and application stores are fast becoming the prime delivery mechanism for infected applications. As a result, your “Bring Your Own Device” (BYOD) experience could very quickly become a “Bring Your Own Malware” (BYOM) very unpleasant experience…

FACT : Mobility is much more than BYOD. Yes, BYOD is the most common and probably feared concern today, but you also have to address corporate own devices and guest access, and all three with a common and consistent approach. The problem here is that most vendors only speak to or can address only one of the three. Experience shows that point solutions fail to deliver comprehensive enterprise network access. So, today’s business environment requires coordinated access across all the identified major mobile user types.

BOTTOM LINE: If you consider the smart phones and tablets proliferation, the fact you have multiple devices per user, you have multiple applications per devices and multiple sessions per application, all this put the campus/branch network under increasing pressure, and there is a need to rethink the way you architect the network. You need a holistic approach to coordinated security for enterprise network access, regardless of who owns a given device. This allows organisations to translate a business policy based on the user’s role and identity and to apply it to the device of the user’s choice. Productivity is enhanced and security is maintained.

IT executives and managers must anticipate this mobile devices explosion and put in place all the necessary tools and components for letting these new devices access the network while at the same time protecting their critical resources and assets. Yes, in most cases, this will require a rethinking of the network architecture, which needs more security coordination, more performance, more scalability and more resiliency. But in the end, organisations will be able to trust, leverage and depend on mobility to create competitive advantage and higher end user productivity. In other words, IT doesn’t need just to be aligned with the business; it is becoming part of it!

What happens when a user with an untrusted device tries to access my network?

Posted on by
Reply

Tiho Strabc, Wireless Specialist, Juniper Networks

From time to time we thought we could use this blog to post answers to questions submitted via our webinars. For starters please see below a response from Tiho Strabc, Wireless Specialist, Juniper Networks in answer to a question submitted via our latest webinar ‘BYOD & Mobile Threats – Is Your Network Simply Connected?’

What happens when a user with an untrusted device tries to access my network?

There are a few aspects to consider here: security, protection of the network and user experience. In short if a user tries to access a network that is simply connected with an untrusted device their access will be denied. However, what is equally important here is that this unauthorised access attempt is recorded and stored for any potential auditing purposes.  It’s important to assess what kind of access this is and also to review if anyone is continually trying to access the network illegally, as this may affect the bandwidth performance for authorised users. There should be counter measures in place to ensure bandwidth is not wasted and that continual unauthorised access attempts don’t affect the network experience for the rest of your wireless users.

For more please visit the recorded webinar here.

Do your virtualised data centre and cloud deployments take the gold (medal) on security and compliance?

Posted on by
Reply

By Malcolm Orekoya, Senior Technical Consultant, Netutils

This post contains original thoughts posted by Malcolm Orekoya, Senior Technical Consultant, Network (Utilities) Systems Ltd. These views are his own.

Ready for the future – Virtualisation wins the race

Data centres have been around for a long time and “Cloud” has been the buzz word for several years now, but what has been the major driver over the years in the exponential growth in the services provided by these two giants? The answer is virtualisation.

Virtualisation is hardly a new concept and now almost all data centres and cloud deployments rely on virtualised infrastructure in one way or the other. This allows for maximum utilisation of space, resources and reduces costs, by being able to run multiple virtual machines (VMs or guests) on a single physical server (host), which can run server and client operating systems.

Historically communications between machines had to traverse physical appliances such as switches, routers and firewalls, where security measures and controls could be enforced. But now within a host machine all guests can communicate within the same system, via the hypervisor (virtual machine manager), virtual network cards and virtual switches, without having to leave that system. Therefore the question of secure communications between the various guests (Inter-VM traffic) had to be answered and in time so did the question of compliance, especially when dealing with sensitive customer information such as credit card details.

Inter-VM traffic security can be achieved in a number of ways, such as via VLAN segmentation or agent based solutions, but these can affect performance, can be costly and are not as granular or scalable. Juniper Networks Virtual Gateway (vGW) series allows data centres and cloud providers to take back control of their virtual infrastructure security and compliance, by allowing comprehensive monitoring of all guest traffic via a hypervisor-based high performance stateful firewall.

Set in the heart of it – The Hypervisor

The vGW engine is integrated directly into the hypervisor, which essentially means we get visibility of all traffic within the virtual environment, because all guest traffic has to go via the hypervisor, meaning there is no requirement to install any agent on the guest virtual machines.

In addition all processing is done at the hypervisor level, so traffic is processed in-line between the guests through the hypervisor with no proxies, caching, content switches or memory copies required. This provides wire line performance, in comparison to other solutions that do a lot of the processing outside the hypervisor, thereby generating a lot of traffic back and forth between the guests, hypervisor and the processing VM or system.

Each guest VM also has an independent firewall instance through the hypervisor, meaning packets from one guest to another are independently evaluated based on individually defined policies for the communicating guests. However, vGW allows the use of defined global and group policies, which cover wider groups of guests and are processed pre and post the individual guest VM policy; allowing incredible granularity with security policies not common with competing products.

Go the extra mile – vGW on top step of podium

There are several additional benefits to the vGW solution that put it on the top step of the podium in this market and it is not possible for me to provide in-depth details of these here, so I’ll simply provide brief summaries:

Introspection visibility; gives vGW a deep knowledge of VM states, including network settings, installed applications, operating systems, hotfixes and patch levels. Alerts can be generated based on this information as well as dynamic security actions. For example you can decide to dynamically apply an internet block policy to a guest VM with bit torrent applications installed.

Integrated Intrusion detection protection (IDP); allows all packets (Windows and Linux only) to be scanned for malware or malicious traffic and alerts sent to designated administrators as appropriate.

Integrated anti-virus (AV) protection; allows on-access and on-demand scanning of guest disks and files for viruses and configurable quarantine actions to be taken on infected guests.

Compliance; functionality includes the use of smart groups, which integrate with vCentre and vGW attributes, as well as smart group policies to dynamically secure certain types of guests with the required internal or regulatory policy. In addition VM “gold” image templates for ideal VM images or configuration and VMware security hardening guide enforcement can be configured to trigger alerts or quarantine a guest that has deviated from the required configuration or image.

Summary

Gartner predicted in 2008 that “virtualisation will be the highest-impact trend changing infrastructure and operations through 2012”* and “The number of virtualized PCs is expected to grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011”*. Now that we’re half way through the 2012 year we can see the proof of this, as most enterprises, data centres and cloud deployments already have a virtualisation program or project in the pipeline.

The tools, technologies and vendors that were available in the market five years ago, to plug the security gaps with virtualisation, have evolved and matured dramatically. Now it’s more a question of who takes first place and the overall gold in the summer of 2012, the clue is in the name; vG(old)w.

(* sourced from Gartner newsroom press releases http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=638207)

Your BYOD Strategy – Where is the trust? – Juniper has the NAC

Posted on by
Reply

By Toby Makepeace, Technical Director, Netutils

This post contains original thoughts posted by Toby Makepeace, Technical Director, Network (Utilities) Systems Ltd. These views are his own.

More and more enterprises faced with pressure from guests to supply secure network access are deploying network access control (NAC) solutions. In today’s digital society there is an increasing expectation from your guests, contractors and staff that they will be able to quickly, easily and securely connect to the internet wherever they are on your premises.  Again, this places pressure on your IT department and brings challenges with regard to deploying solutions that are easily scalable, fast to install and compatible with your existing IT infrastructure.Juniper’s recent White Paper on Network Access Control shares some interesting findings:

‘According to Gartner, Inc., 80 percent of NAC deployments are installed initially to address guest access control. Some enterprises have already installed gear from different vendors to meet individual use cases; for example, deploying one NAC solution for the visitor waiting in the lobby, and another for contractors, partners, or other non-employees who may need broader access.

 …Gartner recommends that enterprises plan for the long term and deploy NAC solutions that not only meet their immediate needs, but also take into consideration their future access control needs and plans.’*

In my experience a good network access control policy and solution mean that things like BYOD should not be a challenge for a business. Your BYOD Strategy should simply start with the fundamentals about who you want to grant access to and what they should be allowed to access based on a number of factors.

  • User classification (staff, contractor, guest)
  • Device type (PC, MAC, PDA, Tablet, Mobile)
  • Device health (Anti-Virus, Patches, Restricted applications)

So once you have a robust BYOD policy in place a “Network Access Control” solution becomes your tool of enforcement. If you do not deploy a NAC solution you will have to consider deploying lots of different networks and trust people to only connect to the network they should be on. Consider though; can you really trust people to connect to the network they should be on rather than the network they want to be on?

By employing a robust BYOD strategy you remove the element of uncertainty and implement an assured method of control. So In my opinion an 802.1x based network access control solution that supports multiple and different EAP-protocols is a must. You should implement a solution that not only caters for the devices you have the ability to control, the “Access Control Client” but also a solution that can still support any 802.1x supplicant a user might have on their own personal device.

This way you make the user access from trusted devices and untrusted devices the same, and allow the solution to determine which network the connection should be terminated on. If the user is on a trusted device, and has a trusted identity (Username and Password) then they should be allowed onto the corporate network. If the user is on an untrusted device (a machine that is not owned by the organisation or fails to meet a security policy requirement) then they should be placed on a separate network with limited access to resources. And finally if it’s the user themselves who is un-trusted, then the question is – do you actually want them on the network at all?

If there are users you do not want on the network (contractors, vendors or guests), they should be on a separate network from your trusted users, irrelevant of the device they are on, trusted or untrusted. A trusted device can fall into one of two categories:

  • A corporate machine that meets a required security policy
  • A personal device that meets a required security policy.

In my view despite the fact that both devices are ‘trusted’ they should be granted different levels of access, and therefore you may want to consider directing them to different networks. For example a full corporate device should be granted full access to the network as if they were on a wired connection. Whereas a BYOD (PC) device would only gain access to resources like the internet, email and intranet (all those web based services users want access to that made you consider BYOD in the first place!)

Now we get into the detail regarding levels of access and control. What I like most about the Juniper UAC solution is its’ ability to integrate with a firewall; to act as a dynamic “user” based firewall. Most firewalls have policies based on Source IP/Destination IP, with the Juniper UAC the firewall rules are based on the User / Destination IP. This allows you to grant network access to an untrusted device to only the resources you consider to be permissible / safe. In addition, as the solution is focused on the user, as that user moves throughout the building and the IP address changes the rules of access are still granted.

The levels of flexibility you have with a good NAC solution should allow you to safely consider BYOD as a benefit to your business. Juniper Unified Access Control (UAC) solutions solve a wide variety of business and technology issues, addressing authentication, end point security and access control capabilities.

‘Enterprises benefit from a single, comprehensive NAC solution that can accommodate onetime guests, repeat visitors such as contractors and partners, employees, and future use cases as they emerge. Juniper Networks Unified Access Control is an integrated, easy-to-use solution that enables enterprises to cost-effectively turn on the right level of access control for their guests today and be well positioned to meet tomorrow’s access control challenges.’

Suggested further reading Juniper Networks, White Paper ‘Guest Access Made Easy‘

* Source Juniper Networks, White Paper ‘GUEST ACCESS MADE EASY, Juniper Networks Unified Access Control and EX Series Ethernet Switches Solve Today’s NAC Problems

Webinar: BYOD and Mobile Threats – Is Your Network Simply Connected?

Posted on by
1

The explosion of mobile devices such as smart phones, tablets and laptops, both corporate and privately owned, demand for wireless connectivity and the explosion of rich media applications (IT and 3rd party) pose new challenges for the IT Manager. In this webinar we discuss Juniper’s Simply Connected portfolio of resilient wired, wireless and security products that enables IT to allow end-users to simply and securely collaborate and access critical information for real time decision-making regardless of device or location.