Samantha Madrid, VP of security business and strategy at Juniper Networks, joined the company about 18 months ago with a very specific security strategy: change how we secure networks by making the network itself threat aware.

This requires architectural change instead of relying on firewalls, endpoint products, and web proxies, she says. And, like other cybersecurity challenges these days, it comes into sharper focus in light of the coronavirus pandemic.

“You have a lot of hospitals isolating their networks, building these standalone triage facilities where they can do large-scale testing and posture assessment for their community, and that right there tells you that you have to make the network more threat aware,” Madrid said.

These rapidly spun-up facilities may not be able to deploy a web proxy or endpoint security technology or other standalone security products, she added. But they will include a wireless network with routing and switching. “So if you have those technologies that are part of standing up a network quickly, and you have advanced threat intelligence integrated and that is a layer that protects you,” Madrid said.

Shortly after joining Juniper, Madrid launched the new security strategy called "Connected Security." “It challenges us to step back and think about the decentralization of the network and what that means for security,” she said. “How does security play a role in those architectural changes? Juniper Connected Security is really about bringing security and security intelligence to every point of connection on the network.”

In practice, this means infusing Juniper’s global threat intelligence feed and other security capabilities into its routers, switches, firewalls, and, most recently, access points to make them threat aware.

The best way to protect users, applications, and infrastructure “it to take the intelligence that we have gathered as an industry over the last 20 years and utilize that effectively across the network, and not just at fixed points or with fixed products in the network.”

Of course, Juniper’s not the only security and networking vendor talking about building security into the network. Other infrastructure vendors including VMware and Cisco also espouse this approach, and standalone security and SD-WAN vendors more recently have begun embracing secure access service edge (SASE), which consolidates networking and security capabilities into an edge cloud-delivered service.

Madrid acknowledges this, but when asked which companies she considers to be Juniper’s biggest competitors she doesn’t name any single vendor. “Everybody that has a line or interest or a strategy of moving toward the convergence of network and security is someone we need to be mindful of,” she said.

But, she says, Juniper’s stronghold in branch-offices networking coupled with the open nature of its security platform give it a competitive edge. “With our over 1 million just branch boxes, already deployed for our customers, we have the ability for them to make that transition seamlessly,” she said. “Some want to do multi-vendor architecture, and that’s fine.”

In addition to supporting third-party switches like Cisco, and integrating with public and private clouds, Juniper’s security platform can connect with third-party vendors via a REST API. “Our theory is better together, and this is why I don’t like the term platform, which denotes you have to standardize,” she said. “There is no cookie cutter. You have to have that flexibility.”