Juniper adds wireless to its 5GT family

• Book ID: 104449500
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2005
• Weight: 47 KB
• Volume: 2
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1742-6847
• DOI: 10.1016/s1742-6847(05)70176-2

✦ Synopsis

J uniper Networks has extended its remote office security product suite, the Juniper Networks NetScreen-5GT, to wireless networking environments.

One year on from Juniper's acquisition of Netscreen, the supplier is squaring up to Cisco and Check Point, and fending off companies in what IDC has called the 'unified threat management' space.

The NetScreen-5GT Wireless product brings what the supplier calls 'wireless security zones', and a set of wireless specific authentication and privacy mechanisms to enable customers to provision appropriate levels of wireless access for different classes of user. The company claims that consistent wireless security profiles can be maintained across the enterprise and remote office sites.

Anton Grashin, security strategist, EMEA for Juniper said: "We haven't just slapped an access point onto the existing firewall. Fundamentally, this is based on the 'security zones' technology, now integrated with wireless. This thing can broadcast four SSIDs simultaneously, each assigned to a different security zone. So, you can manage your firewall policy, and the traffic between the zones. So, one zone could be for hand-held scanners, another for internet access for guests, and yet another gives access back into the DMZ".

Juniper has a patent pending on this. "No one else can provide the same level of policy integration and abstraction of policy", said Grashin.

"Moreover, we play in the space that Check Point and Cisco would like to be in -we own the software and the hardware and so are positioned to make a more integrated play. Cisco is a networking company that wants to be better known for security. And Check Point is a great software security company that wants to better influence the hardware it runs on".