A familiar pattern in IT is the under-and-over cycle of problem to solution to problem again; a new solution tackles some problem, and then a frustrating new challenge bobs up to take its place. This cycle is the bane of companies trying to build the best IT solutions possible, but it provides opportunities for vendors to strike it rich by formulating the antidotes. While the cloud is being touted as the greatest thing since sliced bread, it is manifesting tricky issues around networking cohesion. Meet the new networking whizzes looking to corner this evolving market.

During the Juniper NXTWORK 2016 event, John Furrier (@furrier), co-host of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, spoke about the rash of interest around networking. “Is networking sexy now?” he asked cohost Stu Miniman (@stu), who quipped, “What are you talking about? This is the plumbers’ convention, right?”

Jokes aside, Furrier dove into how cloud — particularly hybrid cloud infrastructure — is playing onto the networking renaissance. “The data centers are moving to the cloud. You have an on-premise, you have cloud apps going on. It makes network more peak in terms of interest,” Furrier stated.

Miniman agreed. “I need to have security and visibility into what’s happening in the data center, wherever my data is. So a lot of times that’s now in the cloud, so there’s various pieces that we need to look at,” he said, explaining that security is perhaps the largest of those.

Automatic for the people

Miniman said that the secret sauce of Juniper Networks, Inc.’s networking solutions is its automation of security tasks that used to take up precious human resources. “It’s not a question of if you’ll be hacked, but when you’ll be hacked,” he said, adding that currently it takes an average of 200 days to find out about a breach.

“Automation does not mean taking jobs away — automation means that it’s going to free you up to be able to work on things,” Miniman explained, “like making sure your security is in better shape rather than running around pulling cables and the like.”

Miniman continued: “The Sky ATP [Advanced Threat Prevention] is the solution that [Juniper has], looking at detection, enforcement, policy and management,” he said.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of Juniper NXTWORK 2016 event.

Photo by SiliconANGLE