Transform Experiences with the AI-Native Campus and Branch Solution Solution Brief

The Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform gives you end-to-end visibility and proactive insights across your network, helping you ensure reliable, secure, measurable connections across your campus and branch environment.

• Mist^™ AI and Marvis VNA

Enable predictable, reliable, and measurable wireless, wired, and SD-WAN networking with unprecedented visibility into the user experience. Built-in AI delivers proactive automation and self-healing capabilities, streamlining time-consuming manual IT tasks, lowering networking operational costs, and saving substantial time and money. A microservices cloud architecture delivers maximum scalability and performance—along with DevOps agility—to wired, wireless, WAN, location, and security. And Marvis VNA provides proactive actions, predictive recommendations, and self-driving network operations to identify and fix issues before users know they exist. Marvis’ robust conversational interface delivers seamless interactions, so it serves as an integrated member of your IT team.

• Enterprise-grade Wi-Fi, Bluetooth^® LE, and IoT

Maximize the value of your wireless network with combined capabilities that enable personalized location services, such as wayfinding, proximity notifications, and asset tracking. And Juniper’s patented virtual BLE (vBLE) technology eliminates the need for battery beacons and manual calibration.

• Secure AI-Native Edge

Minimize your attack surface and strengthen campus and branch network security through a unified interface. Secure AI-Native Edge combines the benefits of Juniper Mist with a next-gen firewall, cloud-based network access control (NAC), and Secure Service Edge (SSE). By integrating SD-WAN and SSE solutions, Juniper delivers a robust Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) solution that provides comprehensive environment visibility, enables exceptional agility, and supports Juniper’s vision for Universal Zero Trust Network Access (UZTNA).

Learn more about AI-Native campus and branch solutions.

Juniper’s modern cloud services give you the agility and scalability you need to easily grow your network according to workload demands. This allows you to gain faster access to innovations with up to 10x more feature updates each year—with zero scheduled downtime.

Juniper makes it easy to add or remove new features by leveraging a microservices cloud architecture driven by Mist AI. We deliver new enhancements and bug fixes almost weekly without network disruption. Services scale up or down elastically when they’re needed, eliminating the cost and complexity of monolithic hardware. Plus, Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform is inherently resilient—our unique microservice cloud architecture means that the failure of one service will not impact others.

The Juniper Mist Cloud enables single-click activation of devices with zero touch provisioning (ZTP) and claim codes. It also includes customizable configuration templates and campus fabric, bringing extensive automation and scale to Day 0/Day 1 operations.

Juniper Mist Cloud uses AI and data science to analyze large amounts of rich metadata collected from Juniper access points, EX Series Switches, and the Session Smart^® Router (SSR) Series to provide you with actionable insights. The AI engine gives you access to the following:

• Supervised machine learning that correlates events for rapid root cause identification
• Time-series anomaly detection that identifies negative trends and determines the magnitude of their impact
• AI-Native Radio Resource Management (RRM) that optimizes the RF settings in real time based on changing conditions
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) that provides quick, straightforward answers to complex queries
• Unsupervised machine learning combined with Juniper’s vBLE technology to accurately locate users and devices

Juniper Mist Cloud enables you to consume networking and location services in a more scalable and cost-effective manner. Simply select the specific subscription services that are best for your environment and then easily add/remove cloud services as your business requirements change. No additional hardware is ever required.

Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform is 100% programmable, using open APIs for full automation and seamless integration with complementary products, including our AI for IT partners across LAN, WAN, security, engagement, and indoor location.

Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, Juniper Mist Wireless (Wi-Fi) Assurance, Juniper Mist User Engagement, and Juniper Mist Asset Visibility services include a base analytics capability for analyzing up to 30 days of data. This allows you to vastly simplify the process of extracting network insights from data and analytics across the enterprise, enabling you to quickly align support resources or introduce enhanced premium services. And if you’re looking to extend the data timeline beyond 30 days or access other third-party solutions with customizable reporting for better shopper and guest behavior understanding, Juniper also offers Mist Premium Analytics subscription services.

Learn more about the Juniper Mist Premium Analytics subscription here.

Juniper’s AI-Native enterprise portfolio enables you to scale and simplify the deployment of wired and wireless campus networks while bringing deeper insights and better automation to your network operators. An enhancement to the Juniper Mist Cloud and AI engine, EVPN-VXLAN campus fabric management is part of Wired Assurance, which expands on Juniper’s unique automation, AIOps, and cloud capabilities to streamline IT operations, lower IT costs, and deliver unparalleled agility and scale. Campus fabric management helps your IT teams:

• Simplify device onboarding using a QR code
• Provide cloud-based EVPN-VXLAN configuration using intent and choice of topology
• Verify, apply, and confirm intent once fabric is provisioned

IT teams using AI-Native campus fabric management can easily onboard, deploy, and manage campus fabrics at scale from the Juniper Mist Cloud.

Eliminate up to 90% of networking trouble tickets

Cut onsite visits by up to 85%

Deploy your infra-structure up to 9x faster

Juniper’s Wi-Fi Assurance is a cloud service based on machine learning and driven by Mist AI, providing the fastest way to deploy and easiest way to manage personalized Wi-Fi experiences. The quantifiable benefits speak for themselves.

Juniper makes Wi-Fi predictable, reliable, and measurable. You can automate operations for your enterprise, save time and money, and gain unprecedented visibility into the Wi-Fi user experience. The network is secured with 802.1X, IPsec, rogue AP detection, and more. Mist Wi-Fi Assurance gives you:

• Customizable Wi-Fi service levels: Set, monitor, and enforce Service Level Expectations (SLEs) for key Wi-Fi performance metrics
• Root cause identification in one click: Proactively identify and fix the root causes of problems using Juniper’s Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE)
• Guest Wi-Fi: Provide scalable guest access with options like multiple language support, customizable branding, social login, and external portal/AAA/RADIUS integration
• AI-Native RRM: Optimize radio settings to assure performance while instantaneously adapting to intermittent outside interference
• Real-time user state information: Identify and resolve wireless interference issues more efficiently with AI-Native dynamic packet capture and dynamic spectrum capture that enable “network rewind”
• Simple resource assignment and QoS with WxLAN: Assign and prioritize network resources to Wi-Fi users with the click of a mouse or via preassigned policies

Juniper’s series of high-performance access points (APs) provide full-spectrum wireless networking.

Best Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE performance

In addition to delivering the best 802.11be (Wi-Fi 7) and 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6E) Wi-Fi range and performance, Juniper APs incorporate a patented dynamic vBLE 16-element antenna array to deliver the industry’s most accurate and scalable location services.

Data collection, analysis, and enforcement

Juniper APs collect data and enforce policies in conjunction with the Juniper Mist Cloud, which serves as a central platform for analytics, machine learning, location services, and event correlation. Delivering enhanced visibility, several models incorporate IoT sensors and a third or fourth radio for business process automation, constant monitoring, and intelligent packet capture to speed up troubleshooting.

Single, enterprise-grade platform for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, and IoT

To support network convergence, Juniper APs incorporate a port for direct and programmable integration to the analog and digital interfaces of IoT devices.

APs designed for experience-first mobility network solutions.

Traditional wired networks are often complex to deploy, reliant on manual configurations, and lack the visibility needed to optimize user and device experience. Juniper’s AI-Native wired access solution redefines switching by combining cloud-native EX switches, Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, and Network Access Assurance (NAC) to deliver the scale, agility, security, and streamlined operations needed for modern networks.

Deliver better experiences across access layer switching with AI-Native operations, enabling scale, automation, and unparalleled visibility. The Juniper Mist Cloud streamlines provisioning, deployment, and management of switches and campus fabrics. Wired Assurance leverages rich Junos telemetry from cloud-native EX Series Switches to enable simpler operations, shorter mean time to repair (MTTR), and more powerful insights into end user experiences.

• Wired service levels: Enforce SLEs of pre- and post-connection performance metrics such as throughput, successful connects, switch bandwidth, and switch health.
• Dynamic Packet Capture: Proactively capture packets at the time of an incident and store the data in the Juniper Mist Cloud. Our network rewind capability relies on this data to support operator diagnosis of intermittent issues that were almost impossible to identify previously, enabling faster MTTR and fewer truck rolls.
• AIOps: Leverage Marvis VNA to uncover “needle-in-the-haystack” issues impacting user experience and use self-driving actions for efficient troubleshooting. Marvis Actions for wired include identifying missing VLANs, bad cables, negotiation mismatches, loop detection, port flaps, high CPU usage, stuck ports, traffic anomalies, misconfigured ports, and traffic loops. Marvis Minis, our unique AI-Native Networking digital experience twins, enable proactive diagnosis of authentication issues.
• Root cause identification in one click: Proactively identify and fix the root causes of problems using Juniper’s Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE).
• AI-Native switch insight: Get switch insights down to the port level for detailed views of CPU, memory utilization, bytes transferred, traffic utilization, and power draw.

Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform enables you to securely, reliably, and seamlessly connect locations at scale by simplifying SD-WAN deployment, configuration, and ongoing operations.

The heart of Juniper’s SD-WAN solution is the Session Smart Router (SSR) that Juniper engineered to deliver exceptional user experiences while meeting the rigorous demands for performance, security, availability, and scalability. This innovative router is the cornerstone of a network that connects seamlessly, transcending traditional routing and SD-WAN solutions with its application-aware, Zero Trust secure network fabric.

Thanks to its innovative tunnel-free architecture that removes the overhead of tunnel management and encapsulation, the SSR eliminates the inefficiencies typically associated with conventional routing. Benefits include improved performance, rapid deployments, and unparalleled operational efficiency.

Key benefits of the Session Smart Networking fabric include:

Improved application performance

The SSR significantly boosts application responsiveness. Its unique tunnel-free architecture reduces bandwidth usage by up to 50%, mitigating network congestion while facilitating immediate failover for critical communications and business applications.

Together with its ability to manage load balancing and traffic steering based on real-time session policies and network conditions, the SSR supports an application-aware network.

Zero Trust security

With the SSR, security is not an afterthought but a foundational principle. It is engineered with built-in Zero Trust access control, directional and segmentation policy, and underpinned by secure vector routing. Integral features, such as IDS/IPS and URL filtering, ensure content and application security without compromise.

Deployment and management flexibility

Adaptability is essential in modern networks and Juniper designed SSR software to support diverse environments. Whether deployed on Juniper SSR Series appliances (Table 1), certified customer premises equipment (CPE), data center network servers, or Juniper NFX Series Network Services Platforms, SSR software delivers the same level of outstanding performance. Centralized management through the Juniper Mist Cloud simplifies oversight, streamlining operations across any scale of deployment.

The Juniper Mist WAN Assurance cloud service streamlines the setup and management of WAN, enhances oversight of branch and remote user experiences, and reduces the time needed to resolve SD-WAN problems.

WAN Assurance integrates data and insights from Mist AI, Session Smart Routers, and SRX Series Firewalls to deliver:

Improved WAN user experiences

Mist AI actively monitors and upholds Service Level Expectations (SLEs) by leveraging key metrics related to application response times, WAN link statuses, gateway conditions, and more. Understanding the influence of these metrics on user experiences is essential for preemptively pinpointing and addressing the root causes of service deterioration.

Informed decision-making with AI-Native application insights

By utilizing Mist AI, customers can understand how network conditions like latency, jitter, and packet loss affect user experiences by application. This provides a clearer view into gateway performance, including CPU and memory usage and link utilization, enabling more informed decision-making.

Proactive anomaly detection with Marvis

With insights from Marvis VNA, WAN Assurance can proactively spot anomalies in WAN gateways. This early detection and resolution of application issues prevents disruption to end users.

Optimized user experiences with Marvis Minis

Marvis Minis cover the full stack—wired, wireless, and SD-WAN. Through automated speed tests, Marvis Minis empower enterprises to verify whether they are receiving the full bandwidth they are paying for, even in the absence of users. Minis also proactively alert operators of upstream network issues so IT teams can work quickly to resolve them before they impact users.

Reduced downtime with Dynamic Packet Capture (dPCAP)

The dPCAP feature in WAN Assurance eliminates the need for replicating network problems for packet capture. Marvis intelligently identifies ongoing issues and autonomously captures the relevant packets, significantly reducing the MTTR and streamlining the troubleshooting process for elusive network problems.

Superior, actionable, AI-powered insights, plus valuable services that increase security and visibility for your network operations.

Revolutionizing the experience-first network for user and device security, Access Assurance is a cloud-based NAC solution that simplifies onboarding clients with easy policy creation and enforcement. It also simplifies design, deployment, and Day 0/1/2 operations.

Zero Trust, experience first

Access Assurance is centered around the secure onboarding of guest, IoT, BYOD, and corporate-managed devices, focusing on the end-to-end user experience and offboarding of users and endpoints.

Network policy enforcement

Based on user and device identity, Access Assurance can instruct the network to assign users to specific network segments (e.g., VLANS), as well as enforce network policies by assigning user roles.

Cloud-native

As the industry’s only cloud-native, microservices, API-first network access platform, Mist Access Assurance removes all the infrastructure requirements needed by all other Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) vendors and unifies the client experience.

Unified management

The Juniper Mist Cloud continuously ingests network access insights, providing enhanced visibility and automation to network operators. This integration allows for a unified view of all user experience data, enabling more effective monitoring and management across the network.

Inherent high availability

Ensures a reliable and resilient enterprise network that supports business-critical operations and user satisfaction.

Stronger security posture and compliance

Deep integration with industry-leading, cloud-based identity providers and Unified Endpoint Management (UEM) and Mobile Device Management (MDM) solutions reduces the attack surface and ensures business ROI. The integration simplifies management of endpoint devices, and boosts productivity across the organization, all while supporting a robust security posture and compliance.

Marvis is the first AI-Native virtual network assistant with a natural language conversational interface to optimize user and operator experiences.

Marvis, the industry’s first interactive VNA, helps IT teams elevate user experiences, simplify troubleshooting, and streamline operations.

• Marvis uses natural language processing and understanding (NLP and NLU) and knowledge graphs to accurately understand user intent and goals. It contextualizes inquiries, returns focused results, and can even take automated actions based on user feedback.
• Marvis Actions leverages the Mist AI engine to identify the root cause of issues across IT domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN, and security). It can either automatically fix them or recommend actions with high efficacy based on the situation and your preference.
• Marvis adds anomaly detection to the SLE framework, enabling your administrators to rapidly and proactively identify service-impacting events and ensure rapid determination and resolution of the root causes.
• Marvis correlates information across a large knowledge base to determine the scope and magnitude of a problem.
• Marvis uses Bayesian Inference, part of Juniper’s data science toolbox, to identify the most probable causes of network issues.

Marvis Minis

By simulating real-world user traffic patterns, Marvis Minis can proactively diagnose issues before they impact user experiences. This empowers IT teams to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted user experience across the networking stack.

Marvis LLM integration

The Marvis VNA integrates large language model (LLM) capabilities and leverages NLP for a truly user-centric experience. Marvis goes beyond keyword matching, employing advanced techniques to grasp user intent behind questions. This conversational interface contextualizes natural language inquiries, offering solutions for troubleshooting network issues.

Juniper’s LLM integration also gives Marvis a deeper understanding of technical documentation and support queries, fostering a more human-like interaction, decreasing IT trouble tickets and streamlining IT operations.

Marvis Application Experience Insights

Marvis Application Experience Insights eliminates blame games. Leveraging AI and user experience data, it pinpoints bottlenecks impacting video collaboration applications (e.g., Zoom, Teams) across the entire network stack—WAN, wireless, and client devices. This enables proactive identification and resolution before user experiences suffer.

Marvis Client

Marvis Client is a versatile software agent designed to work with Marvis to provide in-depth Wi-Fi network insights from the end user point of view. Available for Android, Windows, and MacOS devices, this powerful tool gives network managers and architects unparalleled visibility into how connected devices experience the Wi-Fi environment.

Mist Premium Analytics provides insights from across the entire network—wired, wireless, security, and WAN—based on any combination of Juniper Mist AI-Native data sets. These insights empower operators to identify trends, optimize IT operations and end user/client experiences, plan IT infrastructure, and manage resources.

Analyze long-term trends, visitor behavior, and zone movement in a range of vertical markets, including retail, healthcare, education, and hospitality. Benefits include improved facilities management with insights into occupancy and asset movements.

Perform long-term historical time-series analyses of network activity, security events, and app, visitor, and employee behavior to enhance business decision-making.

Correlate and analyze data across the Juniper Mist Cloud architecture for optimized application delivery. Generate customized queries to monitor WAN performance from campus to branch.

Use visitor telemetry to gain insights into customer/workforce traffic patterns and visitor traffic flow for resource planning, customized notification services, or cross-sell service delivery. Segment visitor traffic patterns with motion paths (traffic flow between departments) dynamically or historically.

Utilize AI-Native insights from Juniper Mist Security Assurance to identify threats, monitor network access, and enhance the security posture. User-friendly dashboards help network and security teams troubleshoot issues faster, reducing resolution time and promoting operational agility.

Look beyond the network to enhance business operations, deliver innovative services, and capture new opportunities.

Juniper flipped the indoor location model on its head. With patented virtual Bluetooth LE (vBLE), it’s easy to deploy indoor location with unprecedented accuracy and agility.

Real-time wayfinding

Help employees, guests, and customers get to where they need to be with turn-by-turn directions. Enable wayfinding with accuracy of up to one meter (3.3 feet) with sub-second latency.

Real-time proximity notification and alerts

Greet patients, clients, or customers as they arrive onsite. Create push notifications anywhere with unlimited virtual beacons. Deliver contextually relevant messages anywhere for a personalized mobile experience.

SDK for mobile app integration

Juniper offers a mobile SDK that enables you to integrate your mobile application wayfinding and notifications with Juniper’s vBLE infrastructure.

With Juniper’s patented vBLE technology, customers can use the same infrastructure they use for engaging with mobile users for asset visibility.

Easily locate key resources like nurses, security guards, and sales associates. Track high-value assets, such as IV pumps and forklifts, with Bluetooth LE tags.

Asset identity

Assign names to asset tags or BLE-enabled mobile/IoT devices to locate these assets on a venue map or integrate location with business applications.

Detailed analytics

Monitor visits and dwell times with detailed drill down into zone traffic patterns and congestion points.

Asset location and analytics powered by APIs

Integrate asset tags, asset location, and analytics applications with the Juniper vBLE infrastructure using a complete and open set of APIs.

With Juniper AI Care Services, you can tap into the power of our team to maximize the value of Juniper Mist innovations, leveraging the power of AIOps and our deep expertise. Juniper helps you effectively design scalable networks, onboard Juniper Mist solutions, and simplify adoption. Juniper experts also transfer knowledge to your IT teams for ongoing operational excellence.

Foundational AI Care comes with Juniper Wireless, Wired, and WAN Assurance solutions, and includes:

• Device onboarding helpdesk
• Knowledge transfer webinar series
• Juniper Support Insights
• 24x7 remote technical support

All the benefits of AI Care plus:

• Onboarding assistance provides review and guidance for customer design and implementation plans, including maintenance window support for cutover
• Single point of contact technical liaison for proactive issue management, technical Q&A and consultation, and monthly operations reviews
• Priority access to senior support engineers
• Two individual one-year All Access Passes for all Juniper Education Services courses

Juniper AI Ultimate Care adds proactive monitoring of the health of network environments and ensures direct alerts to teams when joint action is needed. It includes all the benefits of AI Advanced Care plus:

• Rollout assistance with Mist AI Accelerate Service in the first year, covering design, deployment, and validation
• Single point of contact service advocate for proactive account management
• Proactive health checks and optimization that uses AI to resolve or avoid customer network problems
• Direct alerts for identified critical issues requiring customer action
• Quarterly business reviews with proactive account management

Whatever the level of Juniper AI Care Services, Juniper experts will use Mist AI to deliver a better support experience to enhance network operations, maximizing ROI and the long-lasting benefits from Juniper campus and branch solutions.

Juniper Networks believes that connectivity is not the same as experiencing a great connection. Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform is built from the ground up to leverage AI to deliver exceptional, highly secure, and sustainable user experiences from the edge to the data center and cloud. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net) or connect with Juniper on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.

To learn more about end-to-end assurance with an AI-Native campus and branch, visit https://www.juniper.net/content/dam/www/assets/solution-briefs/us/en/2024/end-to-end-assurance-with-an-ai-native-campus-and-branch-solution-brief.pdf.