This week Juniper Networks announced it has acquired WiteSand, a cloud-native, zero-trust Network Access Control (NAC) vendor. This is Juniper’s fourth enterprise-focused acquisition since it purchased Mist in 2019 but its first in security in almost five years. The goal would be to combine NAC with AI capabilities to add a layer of security to the company’s “Experience-First Networking” vision.
NAC identifies which devices can securely connect to a network. It can deny network access to devices, place them quarantine or give them restricted access to resources—all of which is necessary to keep insecure nodes from infecting the network. But the technology is not widely deployed due to its complexity.
Customers have been bullish on NAC for years, but deployments have been light. Traditional NAC solutions require organizations to install on-premises hardware at various locations. This makes them difficult to manage as rules constantly need updating. In some cases, managing the NAC infrastructure was more complicated that managing the devices without NAC. Looking into the near future, the hybrid work trend and increase in connected “things” does increase the demand for NAC, but the technology needs to be simpler to operate.
WiteSand was founded in 2019, with the goal of delivering plug-and-play NAC by leveraging the cloud. Looking across networking, cloud management has seen strong adoption as it makes deploying, configuring and running infrastructure much easier. It stands to reason that every aspect of the network will eventually shift to being managed via the cloud. WiteSand’s solution uses the cloud to make its NAC “intent-based,” where the system can eventually run itself. This aligns nicely with Juniper’s current product strategy that leverages Mist AI to bring autonomous operations to wired and wireless networks.
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For Juniper, the acquisition has some interesting potential. Pre-Mist, it’s fair to say the company was a less than stellar acquirer. Much of that was because its go-to-market was to try and deliver best of breed products in different areas of networking and security. This model is very difficult to maintain as technology ebbs and flows so competitors leapfrog each other for the title of “best” product. This drove its acquisition strategy to buy the biggest or best vendor instead of one that fits its portfolio better.
As vendors get larger, they typically shift their strategy away from best of breed to having the best portfolio and sell the end-to-end story and that’s what Juniper has been doing a much better job of post-Mist. Apstra, 128 Technology and Netrounds all extend the AI capabilities that Mist brought and help Juniper sell the concept of Experience-First Networking and WiteSand adds to that. The integration of NAC with wired and wireless assurance, WAN assurance, location services and AI can help Juniper deliver a much better end-to-end experience for customers that go “end-to-end” Juniper.
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Historically, network teams have operated in silos where there would be a team that ran the Wi-Fi network and another the WAN and another the campus network, etc. The problem with this is that application performance is based on everything between the client and the cloud so troubleshooting in silos leads to finger pointing. One of the terms that network management vendors would toss around was “mean time to innocence” in that the primary function of their tool was to prove it wasn’t the fault of that group. I always despised this as punting the problem over to another team isn’t helping the user solve their problem.
Mist is an excellent product and customers I have talked to have told me it’s helped offload much of the manual, heavy lifting required to run networks, particularly Wi-Fi, which is notoriously flaky. NAC in dynamic environments, which is almost all businesses today, can be equally challenging. If Juniper can do for NAC what it did for Wi-Fi, it creates another service to add to its growing portfolio of enterprise services enabling to compete better for the whole network.
Looking ahead, now that Juniper has solidified its networking products, I suspect its next wave of acquisitions to be security focused. I recently ran an AIOps study that found that 55% of companies are using the same AI tools to manage networking and security, indicating that after years of talking about bringing security and network operations together, companies are finally doing it. This is a trend Juniper can partially address with its current security products, but I do expect to see continued M&A activity here.
Zeus Kerravala is the founder and principal analyst with ZK Research. He provides a mix of tactical advice to help his clients in the current business climate and long-term strategic advice. Kerravala provides research and advice to end-user IT and network managers, vendors of IT hardware, software and services and the financial community looking to invest in the companies that he covers. He can be reached at [email protected], and follow him @zkerravala and on YouTube.
Industry Voices are opinion columns written by outside contributors—often industry experts or analysts—who are invited to the conversation by Fierce staff. They do not represent the opinions of Fierce.