By Vanessa Cardwell, Marketing Manager, Netutils

Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Vanessa Cardwell, Marketing Manager, Netutils. These views are her own and in no way do they represent the views of the company.

In short, it was all about the latest networking and security innovations from Juniper Networks topped off with a few thrills! Hosted at Mercedes Benz World the workshop gave our customers the opportunity to hear first-hand from Juniper executives and technical experts about the latest innovations in networking and security from Juniper Networks.

In the morning Juniper experts delivered presentations on BYOD, security and networking innovation. We were delighted to also have the opportunity to experience demos of Juniper Network’s innovative Junos WebApp Secure solution and network management solution Junos Space. Following the workshop sessions our guests had the opportunity to experience the buzz of the Mercedes Benz World Driving experiences both on-track and off-road.

Great day all round – useful to meet and talk to other Juniper users and to hear about the other products that Juniper Networks offer during the various seminars. The afternoon driving experience rounded off a great day … thanks to Netutils!
Steve Collins, IT Manager, A Mclay & Company Ltd

The workshop is a fantastic opportunity for our customers to have some 1-2-1 time with Netutils technical experts and Juniper execs. It’s also great for us to spend some quality time with customers, supporting them and discovering more about their security and networking challenges, but what’s really important to us is the opportunity to get to know our customers better. It was a real pleasure to spend the day with a great bunch of people and we hope our customers valued and enjoyed the event as much as we did.
David Silsby, Sales & Marketing Director, Netutils

Please check out the recent video from a previous event for a taster of what was experienced on the day, or read on for workshop highlights.

Securing BYOD & Beyond
Jonas Gyllenhammar, Sr Consulting Engineer, Pulse Architect, EMEA at Juniper Networks

So we all know that BYOD is a great big fat industry buzz word these days, but what was really engaging about Jonas’ session was his point that the phenomenon of BYOD is not simply about bringing your own device, its more than that; it’s about a robust access management policy solution for your organisation and this requires a dynamic policy driven security enforcement solution. A bit of a mouthful perhaps but Juniper Networks’ end-to-end Pulse solution makes this straightforward. In short, it’s simply about 2 things:

1. The User – are they known or unknown?
2. The Device – corporately owned? BYOD, staff member with an unknown device? Or Guest with an unknown device?

Junos Pulse allows you to combine different users and devices. An end-to-end solution which covers all use cases delivering network wide policy orchestration.

Jonas spent some time detailing the different attributes of the Pulse solution – profiling, on-boarding, authentication, device / user authentication, role based access and network wide automatic threat mitigation.  The Pulse solution keeps BYOD simple. It supports the requirement that users need BYOD in different flavours – light and full access. As well as providing full network access to known users and devices, it’s vital to have a simple identity based guest access solution for Wi-Fi access, keeping you compliant and secure. In short, Pulse allows you to deliver the right policies for the right use cases, making the access and on-boarding experience seamless for the user.

Securing the Datacentre
John Pennington, Security Sales Specialist, UKI at Juniper Networks

John’s session covered Juniper Networks’ security strategy. Combined with Juniper’s leadership in firewalls, remote access and their broad security product portfolio, they are the leaders in data centre security. John emphasised that whilst next generation firewalls and “inside-out” security threats are important, the most critical threat facing enterprises today is the emerging ‘outside-in’ threat, which accounts for 73% of all modern attacks. To counter this menace from sophisticated, persistent and well-funded organised groups trying to steal your customers’ money and intellectual property, Juniper have been aggressively investing in leading-edge technology to help secure the data centre now and in the future.

Juniper Networks’ have a suite of security solutions which augment the firewall to protect your business critical web applications.

Junos DDoS Secure
DDos attacks are becoming more and more prevalent and are a major problem for online businesses. Junos DDoS Secure can nullify these problems by continually monitoring and logging all inbound and outbound Web traffic. Junos DDoS Secure uses its CHARM algorithm, a sophisticated heuristic algorithm, to separate malicious from legitimate traffic, and is able to respond intelligently and in real time by dropping suspect or noncompliant packets as soon as the optimum performance from critical resources begins to degrade. DDoS Secure guarantees availability for legitimate users, even under the most extreme attack conditions with zero false positives.

Junos WebApp Secure
Juniper Networks Junos WebApp Secure is the first Web Intrusion Deception System that detects, tracks, profiles and prevents hackers in real-time.

Traditional web application firewalls are seriously flawed because of their reliance on a library of signatures to detect attacks and makes them susceptible to unknown (zero day) web attacks. Junos WebApp Secure stops attackers in the reconnaissance phase by inserting detection points or tar traps into web application code, these traps detect hackers when they manipulate the detection points during the reconnaissance phase of the attack, before they can establish an attack vector.

Junos WebApp Secure tracks attackers beyond the IP address.  Many legitimate users could also be accessing the site from the same IP address—for this reason, Junos WebApp Secure goes beyond the IP address and tracks attackers more granularly, creating a unique digital fingerprint based on more than 200 unique attributes. The tracking techniques allow you to profile the attacker and record the attack. Every attacker is assigned a name and each incident is recorded along with a threat level based on their intent and skill. Junos WebApp Secure also responds to attackers, frustrating them in their efforts to hack your applications by slowing down the connection for example.

John urged customers to take a trial of both solutions and we urge customers to get in touch with us at Netutils if this is something they would like to explore in more detail.

Technical Demos – Junos WebApp Secure, Junos Space – Simplified, Unified Management
Ken O’Kelly, Senior Systems Engineer at Juniper Networks

Exponential growth in network traffic, changes in mobile user behavior, and the onslaught of new cloud services and applications are expanding the avenues available to malicious attackers. Managing enterprise security policy in these complex environments can become prone to error and overly time-consuming, especially if management solutions are slow, unintuitive, or restricted in their level of granularity and control. Poor policy management can also lead to security mis-configuration, making the enterprise vulnerable to sophisticated threats and regulatory noncompliance.

Junos Space is an open, secure, and scalable software platform that allows customers, partners, and developers to build and deploy simple, smart applications that manage and analyse network element data and optimise network infrastructure and operations management. Ken demonstrated the attributes of the Junos Space solution that allows customers to maximise their network value and scale solutions while reducing complexity.

Ken demonstrated the 2 main functionalities of Junos Space – Network Director & Security Director. Security Director provides efficient and cost effective management and allows you to scale management reach across your security and network devices and ease administration and reduce configuration errors through a responsive Web interface. Network Director offers a unified wired and wireless network management application featuring full life cycle management including pre and post deployment life cycle tools with single pane visibility to manage Network infrastructure, users and services.

Junos WebApp Secure

A demo which really captures attention, building on from John’s presentation on the solution earlier in the day in this simple demonstration we were able to show how easy it is to detect, identify, track and stop hackers in their tracks. The simple, clean interface of the solution allows for easy monitoring. Junos Web App Secure looks at two areas – Certainty and Specificity. This ensures that you are blocking the right activity without impacting your business, and identifying malicious behaviour that other solutions can’t even start to think about finding.

The demonstration of Junos WebApp Secure illustrates how the Juniper Networks’ security ecosystem adapts at the speed of risk, where allowing easy access is balanced with stopping attackers from getting what they want.

Please do contact a security specialist at Netutils if you would like further information on any of the solutions covered in our Innovation Workshop, and a big thank you to everyone who participated in this informative and fun event.