Juniper Network’s security products have taken a backseat to its switches and routers over the past year as the company’s cloud business strategy continues to boost revenues. But as hyperscalers, telcos, and enterprises invest more in cloud data centers and architecture, they’ll need to beef up security — which makes cloud security a “very attractive market,” said Kevin Hutchins, SVP of strategy and product line management at Juniper.

Speaking at the 2017 Instinet Media and Telecom Conference, Hutchins acknowledged that Juniper’s security product performance “hasn’t been where we’d like it to be.” But, he added, there’s an opportunity to grow that portfolio.

“Security is just going to become a key feature of how do you connect users to applications, applications to applications, regardless of where they are sitting,” Hutchins said. “The synergy between security and connectivity is just going to increase. Not many people in the market have the ability to provide that combined value proposition of both security and connectivity.”

He said he expects Juniper’s security business to recover by the end of the year.

The industry is in the “first wave of build out of the cloud,” Hutchins said, as Tier 1 cloud providers build bigger data centers to accommodate more traffic. The next wave will see service providers and enterprises applying the hyperscalers’ model to their own businesses.

“This architecture will influence how people build networks,” he explained. “Service providers are going to increasingly look at cloud architecture as a way of offering services to their customers. Enterprises are continuing to move in that direction as well.”

In addition to increasing demand for its switching products, this cloud focus will also grow Juniper’s routing and security segments, Hutchins said. “They are all coupled together. As people build out more data centers, they need high-speed, high-performance networking within the data centers. But they also need to connect the dots and secure all the traffic going between those connection points.”

The shift to a multicloud business strategy, which sees companies’ workloads and applications living in multiple on-premises and public cloud locations, also reinforces the need for stronger network security.

“One of the interesting challenges for the CIO and CISO is how do you manage all of those different environments more seamlessly,” Hutchins said. “How do you connect them together? How do you secure data and users?”

To this end, Juniper has been building out “secure and scalable multicloud offerings for enterprises,” he said. This include its QFX switches, Contrail and Open Cloud Interconnect technologies, and virtual SRX security portfolio. “We see that as a nice growth opportunity as customers transition from the first phase [of cloud computing] to an enterprise approach and how do they decide to manage their multicloud strategy.”