Juniper Networks Launches New Virtualized Security Solutions

Juniper Networks has unveiled a new virtualized security platform designed to protect private and public cloud deployments.

Called the Firefly Suite, the solution allows customers to attach, create and manage security policy across physical and virtual firewalls.

The suite includes what Juniper calls the “Firefly Perimeter”, a virtual version of its SRX Series Services Gateway, as well as Junos Space Virtual Director, an application that automates the management and deployment of Firefly Perimeter.

“When combined with enhancements to Firefly Host, which provides hypervisor-based protection between virtual machines, the suite secures traffic within a virtualized data center as well as traffic to and from it,” the company explained in an announcement.

The Firefly Suite protects virtual workloads and applications in real-time leveraging security intelligence, automation and unified control over virtual firewalls, enabling organizations to securely leverage cloud environments.

The Firefly Suite can be embedded throughout the virtual environment including the hypervisor itself or as VMs connected to the various virtual networks, Juniper said.

Firefly Host, formerly called the vGW Virtual Gateway, is a purpose-built firewall for virtualization designed to protect intra-VM traffic. Tightly integrated into the VMware hypervisor and VMware management framework, it provides hypervisor-based stateful firewall for East-West traffic between virtual machines, including integrated intrusion detection (IDS), virtualization-specific antivirus (AV) protection and compliance tools, with management scale.  

Juniper Firefly Host is available immediately, while Firefly Perimeter and Junos Space Virtual Director are scheduled to be released in Q1 2014.