Like the Wild West of the 1800s, today’s campuses are becoming lawless places. Employees and visitors roam free armed with multiple devices, user owned and company supplied, and expect to connect to the corporate network, wherever and whenever they want to.

Yesterday was Day 2 of Infosec13 in London and it was great to see and feel the buzz on the Juniper booth where we have been sharing our latest innovative security solutions with the show delegates.

If you can't make the show, and with my Data Center hat firmly on, here’s a quick overview of what the exitement is all about in Data Center security from Juniper....

Ask any citizen of a country that has been through a currency change and my guess is that the initial fear, scepticism and doubt was, in time,  replaced with an acceptance that the change was ultimately beneficial when considering the bigger picture.  Of course some will retain an emotional attachment to the ways of old but often progress and emotion are not easy bed fellows.

It is not a secret that mobile operators are accelerating their plans for LTE (4G) deployments. Every time a new city is connected to LTE, service providers appear in the news and this seems to translate ‘great’ marketing and awareness on this new development. 

Pity the legacy network, still in use in so many organizations. It was designed mainly to support static employees using primarily corporate-owned devices—employees who used to sit in the office and access applications located in a data center somewhere on-site.

As the Christmas lights go on and Christmas Carol’s begin to fill the air, what better time to look forward to the year ahead and pick out a few key trends that may have an impact on our industry.

Despite the plethora and variety of products and solutions out there, in many ways technology developments, whether in networking or applications tend to follow a pretty well worn path from hype to religion to reality.

2013 will be a year where in a number of areas we will see key transitions along that path that end users should be on the lookout for and figuring out what conclusions and actions to draw from the claims, noise and reality on offer.

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.

Last week I was helping out at the Juniper Networks booth at VMWorld in Barcelona. It's the first time I've attended the event. It's big! I heard some 7000 people attended. I believe it!

At the recent Juniper Networks Champions Conference in Berlin, a friendly SE organised a session with the Mykonos VP and product manager. A small group of partners turned into a substantial crowd by the end of the session. When partners and Juniper's own people alike start to take an interest like that, you know there is something new and exciting on offer.

Mykonos is described as "Web Intrusion Deception" and straddles three more traditional security areas; Intrusion Detection Systems (IDS), Web Application Firewalling (WAF) and Network Honeypot (HoneyNet). The Mykonos approach is interesting in that rather than inspecting traffic looking for specific signatures or locking down web applications to very rigid I/O, it dynamically modifies pages so that they would appear to be a very tempting target. Mykonos works on the premise that the behaviour of a would-be intruder is different from that of a legitimate web customer. Consider these "real world" scenarios:

Traditional data center networks cast shadows in which security appliances must operate. Modern data centers don't just need new architectures to increase performance, they need them to increase the ability to apply and manage security services.

Certainly BYOD is on everybody’s lips and is the most common and probably feared concern today. You can read about it in every single publication and blog, and all vendors – including those not associated with the topic which raises question of credibility – claim to have somehow a solution to let personal-owned devices securely accessing the network.

A few years ago I had dinner with the CEO of a FTSE 100 company. After about five minutes of the usual pleasantries, he suddenly became very animated about the prospect of showing me his latest toy. He reached into his bag, and with a look of sheer delight on his face, he pulled out an iPad.

The conversation that followed involved a great deal of excitement and enthusiasm about how this new device would change the way he does business. After 10 minutes of positively salivating at the prospect of using his iPad for work, he told me that he'd asked his IT director to order 60 immediately for his senior management team, as the firm must be seen to be "leading the market in technology and innovation".

Whilst he was talking, my mind wandered to the conversations that would follow his request within his IT team. I could almost see the head scratching and endless diagram sketches, with all hands on deck trying to understand how to make the requested device fit in with the standard corporate network.

Ready, FIRE!!!!, aim.... : sometimes information security can feel like trying to put up flak into an air-raid, just hoping that you might take out the threat honing down on you from above - never quite knowing if you have succeeded until after the event.



Whilst we have a veritable arsenal of technology to counter the complex blended threats out there today, more often than not these aim to second-guess the next move by an attacker. Indeed today's application firewalls, IPS etc all do a good job at keeping order in a chaotic environment and when combined with a good SIEM solution, you can also create the analogue of an air-raid siren in the analogy above.



Unfortunately, with the best will in the world, the reality is that we still have the chance for threats to go unnoticed - how many times do we see in info sec books that an attacker only needs to be successful once to achieve their goal. Then there is the consideration that even with the most refined tuning of our network security infrastructure, we still have the false positives to deal with that distract us from our day jobs. 


At a recent press event in London,  launching the Juniper Networks Trusted Mobility Index, I was fascinated to listen to John Smith, ICT Manager of Settle College speak about his organization’s experiences of embracing Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) for the students.

This is a guest blog post. Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Nushin Hernandez, Analyst at Canalys.

The survey results of Juniper Networks’ Trusted Mobility Index have highlighted just how pervasive the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend really is. Looking at the mobile device market – according to Canalys estimates worldwide smart phone shipments grew approximately 63% last year, similarly pads or tablets have seen rapid adoption, up a staggering 274% by the end of 2011. Smart phones and tablets in particular, which have conventionally been viewed as consumer devices, are increasingly making their way into corporate environments and businesses around the world are now faced with the challenge of managing a growing mobile workforce using multiple devices and multiple operating systems with increasing data consumption. These mobile devices can no longer be categorised as simply corporate or consumer. The number of personal-liable devices has grown considerably over the last year. Canalys estimates the number of personal-liable smart phones will grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 43% from 2011 through to 2015.