Juniper Networks announced the latest innovation to its AI-driven enterprise portfolio, the Juniper Mist® Access Assurance service.

This new service leverages Mist AI and a modern microservices cloud to provide a full suite of network access control (NAC) and policy management functions via the same flexible and simple framework already included in Juniper’s wired access, wireless access, indoor location, SD-WAN and secure client-to-cloud portfolio. The result is unsurpassed automation, insight and assurance for superior access control and policy enforcement, coupled with exceptional operational savings.

“Network administrators often fear their own legacy NAC solutions because they are built using on-premises overlay hardware, which makes them brittle, complex to deploy and operate, and inherently lacking in both scale and resiliency,” said Sudheer Matta, Group VP of Products at Juniper Networks. “The new Juniper Mist Access Assurance service solves this by natively integrating NAC into the network infrastructure, and by leveraging AIOps and a cloud-native architecture to seamlessly set up and operate access management, policy creation and enforcement from anywhere via a familiar interface. With our groundbreaking Mist AI and microservices cloud, Juniper customers and partners get exceptional client level insights and automation, deployment times that are reduced from months to minutes and cost-effective resiliency and scale. By integrating Mist AI with NAC, Juniper is further expanding the value of the AI-driven enterprise portfolio, while bringing much needed modernization to a key part of the network.”

Features of the new Juniper Mist Access Assurance service include:

- Granular security: Juniper Mist Access Assurance is natively integrated into the network, as opposed to traditional overlay NAC systems. It provides secure user-, role- and device-based network access aligned with Zero Trust principles enforced for guest, IoT, BYOD and corporate-managed devices. Juniper Mist Access Assurance provides granular network admission controls leveraging the secure 802.1X standard, looking at user/device identity, role and location context to allow for identity-based micro-segmentation and policy assignment.

- AI-driven automation: The Juniper solution provides automated zero-touch network access with fast, one-click device provisioning. In addition, it is 100% programmable, using open APIs for full automation and seamless integration with Juniper Secure Analytics (JSA) and other SIEM or ITSM systems and identity providers for configuration, authentication and real-time data extraction. The Juniper Mist Access Assurance service, like the rest of the Juniper AI-driven enterprise portfolio, is powered by Mist AI and the Marvis Virtual Network Assistant for proactive troubleshooting and self-driving operations to save time and money.

- Cloud-native simplicity, resiliency and scale: Juniper Mist Access Assurance greatly simplifies the administrator experience by combining cloud-based deployment, easy-to-use workflows, simplified policies, API-based automation and troubleshooting for connected devices. A unique microservices-based cloud architecture ensures support for one to tens of thousands of sites, users and devices with exceptional ease and no planned downtime. The service also provides geo-affinity to users for reliable and low-latency access control, which eradicates the need for complex network designs that require multiple on-premises NAC devices and/or load balancers across many data centers. Further, the Juniper® Cloud provides elastic scale, ensuring cost effective growth in conjunction with customer demand.

- Client-to-cloud assurance: Juniper Mist provides a unified cloud-hosted management experience for IT operations across the full network stack, including SD-WAN, SSE, wired and wireless access. By leveraging a common cloud and Mist AI engine, Juniper delivers automation and insight for superior end-to-end user experiences. This includes, for example, unified event correlation, anomaly detection, prescriptive actions and even self-driving network operations.

The Juniper Mist Access Assurance service works in conjunction with other Juniper Mist Cloud and Connected Security services, including Wired Assurance, Wi-Fi Assurance and Marvis™, the industry’s only virtual network assistant driven by Mist AI, as well as Juniper Connected Security services. Marvis combines 7th-generation data science with extensive network (wired/wireless/WAN), location and security domain expertise and a conversational interface to provide exceptional visibility into user experiences and proactive automation to detect and solve problems before users know they exist. Today, Juniper announced new enhancements to Marvis that include LLM (Large Language Models) and support for Zoom, making it even easier to deliver predictable, reliable and measurable user experiences from client to cloud.