Juniper Networks added features to its security platform that more tightly integrate the analytics and remediation technology Juniper acquired from Cyphort last year. It’s part of a move by the vendor — and the larger cybersecurity sector — to unify security products and capabilities into a single platform.

“Security platforms are the direction that all buyers of most of the established network security players (Cisco, Juniper, Palo Alto Networks, Fortinet, Checkpoint) are headed,” said IHS Markit analyst Jeff Wilson. “It’s a necessity as buyers look to reduce the number of vendors they interact with in the network and the cloud to reduce the number of seams they have in their mitigation infrastructure. It’s the seams between security solutions that hackers often exploit.”

In December Juniper added new machine learning and automation capabilities to its Software-Defined Secure Networks (SDSN) platform. This included automated policy management for Security Director, Juniper’s software that provides network security policy management.

At the time it also launched an on-premises appliance based on Cyphort’s technology.

The updates announced today show “how we’re evolving the Cyphort acquisition capabilities, bringing together the best of both worlds from Cyphort and what we already have in place with our security platform, driven by our SDSN,” said Amy James, senior director of security product marketing at Juniper.

Juniper renamed the on-premises Cyphort device. It’s now called the Juniper Advanced Threat Prevention Appliance, or ATP appliance. It is the on-premises counterpart to the cloud-delivered Sky ATP product. Both use Cyphort’s analytics and remediation technology to provide built-in threat behavior visibility and one-click mitigation.

Additionally, the SRX series firewalls now feed directly into the ATP appliance. This integration enables the aggregation and correlation of security threats from various Juniper and third-party sources into a consolidated timeline view of all threats in the network, James explained. Security teams can then prioritize alerts and mitigate threats with one click.

The company also integrated the ATP appliance with Security Director Policy Enforcer. “Policy Enforcer is the life blood of our management and visibility platform for security,” James said. This new integration provides a unified view of threat behavior across the security fabric. It also enables adaptive malware detection that triggers automated policy enforcement across networks and cloud environments.

IHS's Wilson said Juniper’s security technology stands out for its virtualization.

“Of the primary network security vendors, Juniper has a lead over most of their competitors in the development of the virtualized elements of their fabric, and they also have a mature and well-deployed SDN controller/orchestration solution,” Wilson said. “So as folks, especially larger customers, look at solutions that bridge physical and virtual, Juniper will start to stand out.”

“This is an evolution of our unified cyber security platform — we’re creating a whole ecosystem of cybersecurity,” James said, adding that the platform supports non-Juniper gear including Cisco switches and partners with several other cloud, networking, and security vendors to extend workload protection across environments. “We want to unify everything, and we also want it to be open because we know that’s the future.”

The platform previously integrated with Microsoft Azure and VMware NSX. Today it added Amazon Web Services (AWS) support.

Security partners include Carbon Black, HPE’s Aruba, CipherCloud, ForeScout, and Netskope, among others.

This open integration strategy helps chief information security officers (CISOs) solve two problems: not enough security professionals and security product fatigue, James said.

“We asked CISOs what is keeping then up at night, and nearly everyone said they can’t find enough security practitioners,” she said. “So anything that automation can do to address that is seen as very laudable. Also, they are looking at vendor consolidation. They said we don’t necessarily want to only have one vendor, but we’d love to go from 15 down to two or three. Because we have an open situation and we are able to integrate so easily with other vendors, people don’t need to rip and replace everything to take advantage of our platform.”

But will it be enough to turn around Juniper’s struggling security business? After watching security revenue fall since 2016, the company finally saw a return to year-over-year growth for this segment in the fourth quarter of 2017. Still, security declined 8 percent for the year.

Wilson said the company is on the right path.

“They have stabilized and are on a path of steadier growth,” he said. “Focusing on the fabric, their strength in network orchestration, and their strength in virtual, particularly for the large and forward thinking customers that Juniper targets overall, is the right recipe for continued growth.”