Juniper Networks is taking the road less traveled in its adoption of a secure access service edge (SASE) architecture beginning with policy management.

Rather than rolling out new cloud-based security functionality, or announcing partnerships to fill those gaps as many of its competitors in the red-hot market already have, Juniper is starting its journey by creating a unified platform for managing policy in a single unified place.

“We're stepping into the SASE market leading with management because visibility is one of the most important things to a security operator,” said Kate Adam, senior director of security product marketing at Juniper.

Dubbed the Juniper Security Director Cloud, the product is designed to provide customers with a single console for managing security policies, regardless of whether they’re for services running on premises or in the cloud.

“We’re taking a very different approach than some of our competitors in the market when it comes to SASE,” said Adam. “We’ve looked at SASE from an operational standpoint, understanding that this shift in architecture, this network transformation, is going to take at least 18 months.”

While Adam admits Juniper is far from the first to jump into the SASE market, she argues that the additional time has given the company a unique perspective on what’s working and what isn’t.

“The competitors who have been first to market, we've noticed that they are breaking this cardinal rule of security,” she said. “That's consistent visibility, that's unified management. We always talk about single pane of glass. It is one of my least favorite phrases because it doesn't exist, and with SASE, that's especially true.”

She argues that the competition may have managed to string together networking and security into a SASE architecture, but few have managed to maintain consistent visibility and policy enforcement across those two categories.

“If you look at any of our competitors, the management offerings that they are bringing to market are an either or strategy,” Adam said. “They either address the traditional on-premises deployments, or it address the cloud-based deployments. To integrate the two, our competitors are shifting that burden on the user.”

In many ways, Juniper’s Security Director Cloud could is the glue that will tie together the rest of the company’s SASE networking and security stack.

Juniper already has a strong presence in the SD-WAN market thanks to the acquisition of 128 Technologies last year, however, the company still lacks core security functionality, which Adam said the company plans to roll out over the next year both in the form of organic products and partnerships.

The company’s initial focus will be on making the transition to a SASE architecture easier on customers regardless of where they are in their journey, she said.

The latest development is “really all about laying the foundation for our customers to transition to a SASE architecture seamlessly and securely, so security policy can follow the user, follow the device, follow the application as that architectural shift occurs,” she said.

Using Security Director Cloud, customers can define security policy based on the user or application, and have it synced across the entire SASE security stack.

This, Adam said, ensures that policies are enforced consistently regardless of whether a user is accessing an application from the branch, home, or in transit. This approach improves visibility across on-premises and cloud security stacks and helps to avoid configuration errors, she said.

“We’re really trying to … get rid of some of the manual effort involved in an architectural shift, and it’s all going to be distributed from and enabled by Security Director Cloud,” Adam explained.

Juniper plans to offer its SASE platform in two ways. The first will see the company operate the cloud-delivered platform similar to a software-as-a-service application with the cloud security stack running in Amazon Web Services (AWS). The second is tailored toward managed service providers and network operators and will see Juniper offer its SASE software stack as a virtualized environment that can be deployed in the environment of their choice.

“With Security Director Cloud, we are running it, but we can also allow the customer to run it themselves,” Adam said. “That allows our [managed service provider] customers to run it themselves.”