BANGALORE, INDIA: Today 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 are being driven primarily by increasing complexity and distribution of networks, increasing sophistication of applications, etc.

Douglas Murray, Sr VP and general manager, High-End Security Systems BU, Juniper Networks, discusses the trends  in adoption of high-end security products, the turnaround of Juniper ever since the acquisition of Netscreen and market trends in an interview given to CIOL.

CIOL: What are the key drivers of high-end security solutions ?

Douglas Murray: Security has become so much integral part of the high design we seen in the applications today. Even eight years ago security was something a bunch of college kids trying to crack some code, but now it's business and security has evolved to very real time.

Today, we seen hackers are continuously trying to break into carrier networks to steal minutes which can make a direct impact on the revenues. And with conficker or botnets type of threat coming out more and more, it can be pretty scary if a business today doesn't have a well secured network.

CIOL: How has Juniper evolved since the Netscreen acquisition ?

DM: Juniper acquired Netscreen, which was a big security player, five years ago. The acquisition also brought in a lot of enterprise expertise and since then we have been on a mission to integrate security and security practices into Juniper. Now we are at a point where we have done significant amount of development of bringing Netscreen into Juniper.
 
When Juniper expanded into Ethernet switching with EX family little over a year ago, it only furthered our mission. Now, as a company, we have a wonderful arsenal of Ex Switches, Routers and e-security products all working together. It has taken a lot of R&D investment and effort to bring us to the point where we are today.

CIOL: What do you think are the biggest achievements of Juniper in high-end security systems?

DM: Junos is one of the most impressive things which we have worked on developing. It's a single operating system (Image) that works on all of our new products making the operations very simple. It was a vision, the company embarked upon and it's very impressive to see there has been well over 40 consecutive releases of Junos and a lot of that gets done in Bangalore.

The SRX Series Services Gateways has been another big achievement. The series provides the essential capabilities necessary to connect, secure, and manage enterprise and service provider networks, from the smallest sites to the largest headquarters and data centers. We have two models of SRX, the fastest fire wall today, and they are six times faster than anything else ever made.

CIOL: What are the latest trends that you are seeing in the adoption of security products?

DM: The customers, weather it's a large data centers or enterprise, today look at lot more in terms of value because of the costs involved and the post purchase operation costs. The factors that a vendor would look at in any high-end product is:

1. Scalability: It is not just the scale that they need it today. In a data center or any other place, they view it from CAPEX (capital expenditure) or OPEX (operational expenditure) vantage point. They want to make sure that they can grow into it. This concept allows you to grow and how you evolve. So a lot of customers view scale as huge. They want to know if they are investing at least for a few years.

2. Integration of applications: The second question I get most is about the applications. The proliferation of applications just continues to evolve (for example Web 2.0, Facebook), bringing different level of security needs to home environment or workplace environment and that's creating a lot of questions in our customers' mind.

3. Basic manageability: A lot of our customers do not want or have the ability to keep on adding folks in terms of their  internal IT. They want to manage with less staff. Any enterprise today looks at how it can optimize its environment to the best even while expanding.

CIOL: Looking beyond 2009, what will be the key market drivers?

DM: Reports from international research organizations including the Infonetics Research indicate that market is going to be flat in during 2009. However, the area that is growing ahead of market is intrusion detection and intrusion prevention system (IDS and IPS) products. The other thing that is growing is the integrated technologies - whether it's the firewall or the concept of  integrating switching and other technologies.