Juniper expands threat intelligence for more effective network defense

You may have heard that two heads are better than one—the basic premise being that different perspectives bring more to the table and enable the combined team to make better, more effective decisions. The same thing is true when it comes to threat intelligence and network security, which is why Juniper Networks is expanding the capabilities of its Spotlight Secure platform.

The threat landscape continues to evolve, and attackers adapt to find new and innovative exploits. Organizations respond by throwing together some sort of mish-mash patchwork of tools and detection technologies. Each solution might be fine in and of itself, but the complexity of managing the chaotic mix can actually make the network more vulnerable rather than less.

Juniper Networks is no slouch in the network security department, but it is just one company. Any product or service that relies only on vendor-specific information is, by definition, more myopic than a product or service that aggregates data from multiple sources. Juniper recognizes the value of diverse sources of information, so it has expanded the Spotlight Secure platform to compile threat feeds from multiple sources including Juniper Networks, as well as third-party thread feeds and threat detection technologies.

“To effectively defend against targeted cyber attacks that contain evasive malware and advanced persistent threats, organizations must be able to consume best-in-class security data to accurately identify targeted attacks and respond quickly,” explained Freddy Mangum, chief marketing officer for Lastline. “By integrating Lastline’s Advanced Threat Intelligence with Juniper’s SRX Firewall, customers can obtain greater visibility and protect themselves from Advanced Targeted Attacks.”

Jonathan Davidson, senior vice president and general manager for the Security, Switching and Solutions business unit of Juniper Networks shared his thoughts on the new capabilities. “We have transformed our security solution to address the challenges and constraints that our customers face with traditional firewalls. By creating an open framework that enables the aggregation of intelligence data from multiple feeds, we can provide application and user-level visibility. In addition, this solution is able to increase agility to effectively combat evolving threats in order to keep High-IQ networks secure.”

With the new capabilities of Juniper Networks Spotlight Secure platform, IT admins can define enforcement policies from all feeds through a single, centralized management point. The combination of the broader perspective of meshing multiple sources of threat intelligence, and enabling simplified management for IT admins should ostensibly result in network defense that is more comprehensive, and more effective at the same time.