GARR Chooses Juniper Networks and Corero Network Security for Automated, Integrated DDoS Network Protection

Joint Solution Delivers Significant Time Efficiencies & Improved User Experiences

MILAN, Italy, October 20, 2020 – Juniper Networks, a leader in secure, AI-driven networks, today announced that GARR, the ultra-broadband network dedicated to the Italian research and education community, has deployed the Juniper Networks’ and Corero joint DDoS protection solution, the SmartWall® Threat Defense Director (TDD).

The GARR network is an extensive digital infrastructure with approximately 15,000 km of optical fiber covering Italy. It reaches approximately four million users in almost 500 organizations and connects more than 1,000 sites, most of which are public institutions including research institutes, universities, research hospitals, cultural institutes, libraries, museums and schools. The GARR network is interconnected with international research networks and across the internet, making it fundamentally important to many ground-breaking scientific, medical, economic and arts-based research projects with global impact.

The GARR governance model promotes inclusiveness and involves users in decision-making on the future evolution of the network and digital infrastructures. Unlike commercial providers, users on the GARR network aren't just consumers of data, content and services; they are involved in the development of services and solutions as well as sharing their own resources for the benefit of the scientific community, thus becoming active contributors.

The organization was recently targeted by sophisticated DDoS attacks, which became shorter in duration and more widely distributed on the network. GARR often received several DDoS attacks in one day. Most of these were large enough to impact the user experience on the network and a few were severe in terms of network congestion and failure. GARR decided to look for a more effective detection and mitigation mechanism in order to react quickly against future attacks. The SmartWall TDD solution is deployed to leverage GARR’s existing procedures and organizational structure, working synergistically with GARR’s existing Juniper infrastructure based on the MX Series Universal Routing Platform.

News Highlights:

The joint-solution technology deployment has provided a host of operational benefits:

• GARR values the automated, hands-off efficiency of the joint Corero-Juniper solution, which frees up skilled security staff to work on other tasks. With the Juniper and Corero solution, GARR operates more efficiently, saving approximately 20% of staff time dedicated to network security.
• The Juniper-Corero solution delivers comprehensive visibility into attacks using big data analytics and visualization capabilities that transform security event data into sophisticated, customized dashboards. This information engine enables GARR to foster its own statistic and report systems integration, delivering actionable insights to the business.
• The solution significantly improved the organization’s end-user experience. GARR users are an active part of the research network. In the past, they were often unaware of any DDoS attacks, so they regarded any downtime or lack of service as a network problem, without understanding the underlying issues.
• The solution is highly effective, automated and scales to multi-terabit capacity at a lower cost than any other available DDoS solutions.

GARR implemented the following Juniper-Corero solution:

• The SmartWall TDD software developed by Corero to meet the demand for Terabit-scale DDoS mitigation by intelligently leveraging the silicon filtering power of Juniper Networks MX Series routers.
• This Juniper-Corero network-based DDoS defense solution is particularly well-suited for mitigating attacks in large-scale networks supporting a large number of high-speed links and routers at the internet edge.

Supporting Quotes:

“Thanks to the Juniper-Corero joint solution, we operate our network more efficiently. We estimate that we’re saving about 20% in terms of staff time dedicated to network security. It’s clear that no human, or even a team of 10 security analysts, could react quickly enough to manage these sophisticated DDoS attacks. In contrast, for some types of attacks, this solution is so fast that we have to review our security incident workflow to see what happened because, in most attacks, no human intervention is needed to overcome the problem.”

– Massimo Carboni, Chief Technology Officer and Head of Infrastructure Department at GARR

“We are very pleased to partner with Juniper Networks to provide a superior DDoS solution architecture that allows GARR to simply increase the scale of their protection with any future network extensions. The SmartWall TDD couples Corero’s surgically accurate, real-time automatic DDoS protection with the high-performance packet filtering of Juniper MX Series routers. This, along with the comprehensive visibility into attacks, enabled GARR to create their own customer dashboards that improved the end-user experience.”

– Lionel Chmilewsky, Chief Executive Officer at Corero Network Security

“In an always-on world where downtime is a huge problem for businesses, service providers and enterprises must re-examine their existing DDoS protection strategy and consider new techniques that deliver faster, more effective protection at a far lower cost. GARR selected Juniper and Corero’s highly-automated joint solution for DDoS protection that self-heals the network because it meets those criteria: efficacious, fast and cost-effective.”

– Mario Manfredoni, Director, Italy Sales, EMEA, at Juniper Networks

Additional Resources:

• GARR case study

About Juniper Networks

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