Juniper Networks Inc. is beefing up security for its networking infrastructure with a new update to its platform that automates policy management and makes it easier to mitigate security breaches.

The company said today that it’s updating its Software-Defined Secure Networks platform in order to relieve the strain on overworked security teams, who it said are “bogged down” by the manual processes needed to ensure their networks remain secure.

In its pitch, Juniper cited a recent study it commissioned from the Ponemon Institute, which found that though new technologies such as machine learning can help to alleviate some of the repetitive tasks necessary to keep networks secure, most professionals believe they will never fully replace human involvement. With that in mind, Juniper said it’s trying to minimize that “human involvement” as much as it can by simplifying the tasks of security teams.

“At Juniper, we feel that automation is a key to better protect enterprise networks,” said Mihir Maniar, Juniper’s vice president of security product management. “The traditional manual processes are labor intensive and inefficient, leading to wasted time and resources.”

One of the major headaches that requires direct human input is setting security policies in response to network threats. To remedy this, Juniper is adding automated policy management capabilities to its Junos Space Security Director platform.

The new Dynamic Policy Actions feature reduces the time it takes to create remediation policies in response to an attack from an average of 30 hours to a matter of minutes. In addition, Junos Space Security Director can also define enforcement based on metadata, so security teams can create policies that can be automatically provisioned across multicloud environments.

On the threat mitigation side, Juniper is touting a new on-premises malware detection appliance that combines its own remediation technology with analytics software from security startup Cyphort Inc., which it agreed to acquire in September. The company said that the new Advanced Threat Prevention Appliance with One-Touch Mitigation provides greater visibility into threat behavior, while the one-touch mitigation feature can speed up response times from an average of two hours to as little as 10 minutes.

The final update is Juniper’s new SRX4600 Next-Generation Firewall, which is optimized for cloud environments. The new offering provides a “single pane of glass” view of customer’s enterprise security landscapes, ostensibly making it easier for security pros to spot network intrusions and other events.

Image: geralt/ppixabay