Best-of-breed SASE from Juniper and Zscaler Solution Brief

Challenge

An emerging market for single-vendor SASE makes it difficult to source best-of-breed deployments, limiting flexibility and choice.

Solution

Together, Juniper and Zscaler create a best-of-breed SASE solution that is managed through a single interface and provides the benefits of both single and multivendor SASE architectures.

Benefits

- Delivers best-in-class networking and industry-leading cloud security
- Simplifies IT, improves security, and optimizes user experience
- Streamlines branch WANs and provides better security

The modern distributed workplace—including enterprises with thousands of branches and remote workers—requires updated approaches to cloud, networking, and security infrastructure. Cloud migration has led to a huge increase in sophisticated applications and the need for networks to support an increasingly remote workforce that accesses applications in both the cloud and the data center. Overall, this distributed environment creates unique security requirements, including special capabilities to handle unpredictable locations of users, applications, and traffic flows. These sophisticated applications and modern workplaces need a new networking and security architecture.

Security Service Edge (SSE), as defined by Gartner, is a convergence of network security services, such as Secure Web Gateway (SWG), Cloud Access Security Broker (CASB), Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), and Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA), delivered from a purpose-built cloud platform. SSE can be considered a subset of the secure access service edge (SASE) framework with its architecture squarely focused on security services. SASE combines the WAN edge, such as SD-WAN, with SSE.

Recognizing that security must be fully integrated into the modern network, Juniper^® SD-WAN, driven by Mist AI^™ has built-in security capabilities that are an inherent part of the architecture. In addition, service-based routing ensures that sessions are delivered based on identity and context to relevant parties following unified policies.

Zscaler together with Juniper SD-WAN deliver a comprehensive SASE solution, enabling cloud-centric digital businesses to provide secure access to users and devices anywhere. Combined with security for LANs and cloud infrastructure via SSE functionality through Zscaler, Juniper SD-WAN provides a best-in-class, full SASE solution. Zscaler delivers the world’s most comprehensive SSE protection across users, workloads, IoT/OT, and customers. With this new partnership, network administrators can easily create and manage their secure connections to Zscaler through Juniper Mist Cloud.

Zscaler offers a complete cybersecurity stack and zero trust connectivity that protects devices, assets, users, and workloads. The Zscaler Zero Trust Exchange is delivered as a service, providing true SSE protection. When integrated with Juniper Mist Cloud, customers can easily create, manage, and scale connectivity from remote locations to the Zscaler cloud.

In enterprises, network administrators like single-vendor SASE because it offers a single management platform for creating and maintaining SD-WAN and SSE deployments. However, in a nascent market for single-vendor SASE, this comes at a cost. Companies lose the ability to choose the devices they deploy on their network and the flexibility to deploy their network in ways that best fits their business. More critically, they lose the option to build a best-of-breed architecture.

A multivendor SASE delivers the benefits of:

Greater flexibility: Organizations gain more flexibility to choose the best-of-breed solutions for their specific needs.

Reduced costs: A single-vendor solution can increase costs, especially for organizations with complex needs or limited budgets.

Avoid vendor lock-in: Organizations are not tied to a single vendor and can switch vendors if necessary.

With the new Juniper Networks and Zscaler partnership, you gain the simplicity and visibility of a single-vendor SASE solution without losing the benefits of a best-of-breed SASE solution. This partnership allows network admins to use the Juniper Mist Cloud to configure and manage their connections to the Zscaler SSE without logging in to a second platform. In only a few clicks, you can connect your SSE, choose which traffic to send to it, and easily apply policies to better secure your network.