Juniper Networks detailed its secure access service edge (SASE) strategy today after dropping hints about it since the RSA security conference earlier this year. And, according to Samantha Madrid, Juniper’s VP of security business and strategy, it’s more than just marketing.

The networking and security vendor has been touting its Juniper Connected Security strategy for a year and a half. This involves enforcing security policies at every connection point across the network: switches, firewalls, routers, public and private cloud, and endpoints. And Juniper’s Connected Security push started about six months before Gartner said the future of network security is SASE. This architecture combines SD-WAN and security capabilities into a cloud-managed platform, and it’s best delivered by a single vendor.

“So we were very encouraged when we saw Gartner’s SASE research come out, because it really supports and speaks quite nicely to the Connected Security strategy we’re driving here,” Madrid said in an exclusive interview with SDxCentral.

“A network, in our view, is about bringing things closer to the edge, and making things more scalable,” she continued. “Customers want simplicity, scalability, and flexibility, and moving services to the edge gives them all of that at low latency. The Connected Security strategy is inclusive of all those principles.”

And, Madrid added, Juniper’s strategy accommodates customers wherever they are on their digital transformation journey. Some are moving entirely to cloud-delivered services and a distributed workforce. Others are still virtualizing workloads within their data centers and co-location facilities.

“The whole premise behind Connected Security is, no matter where you are in that journey, we can support you,” she said. “The Connected Security strategy is about safeguarding the users, and the application, and the infrastructure, irrespective of architecture. It’s absolutely inclusive of SASE, and we feel quite strongly that it supports it.”

Gartner identifies some core SASE components, and these include SD-WAN, secure web gateway, cloud access security broker (CASB), zero-trust network access, and firewall-as-a-service, and all with the ability to encrypt and decrypt content at line speed and at scale while continually monitoring sessions for risk.

Juniper has most of these pieces including the WAN, LAN, secure web gateway, zero trust, and a virtualized and containerized firewall. Additionally, Juniper offers advanced threat protection, intrusion detection and prevention, and data loss protection. It doesn’t, however, have a CASB — Juniper partners with Netskope for that piece. Since acquiring Mist in April 2019, along with its artificial-intelligence (AI) engine, Juniper has been integrating AI and threat-intelligence into all of these pieces as well.

This AI-driven automation and insight across the WAN, LAN, and wireless WAN, as well the security components give Juniper’s SASE a competitive edge, Madrid said. “It’s being able to identify, not just what’s happening in their network, from availability, to capacity, to quality of their links, their uptime, what’s happening within their bandwidth and their environment. But also being able to provide correlated information from a statistical standpoint to what’s happening on their network, so they can truly bring all the aspects of automation and insight across their entire organization.”

Additionally, Mist has a virtual network assistant named Marvis that provides recommended actions to improve network performance. And earlier this year, Juniper integrated its security intelligence feed, SecIntel, with Mist, thus fusing AI and security.

“We are committed to delivering the best-in-class services: AI-driven automation, security, and threat intelligence with telemetry, flexible enforcement for our customers supported with a threat-aware network,” Madrid said. “It’s more than what is happening at the edge. We need to have visibility into everything that’s happening inside your organization. And that’s the whole point — it’s more than just marketing. It’s more than just putting a data sheet out there that says I have a SASE solution. It’s how all those pieces come together.”