Is this the answer to Internet security?

Stuart Corner
Friday, 07 December 2007 05:39

Opinion and Analysis

However such functionality is not yet mature or widely deployed. Janey said: "It is very early days, the market is still maturing. We have seen similar technology in the VPN space but now we are extending that to include anyone who is connecting to the network at any time from inside or outside...It is not just about when a user joins the network for the first time, but about making sure they can continue to be trusted and making sure they don't go to parts of the network where they might pick up something malicious. And about being able to take action to quarantine a user if they do. This is where UAC is going to evolve."

He added: "2007 has really been a year of education for the market and we have seen a myriad of vendors appearing with different sets of features and functionality and a lot of our time has been spent educating customers as to what can be done and to broadening our solution to work with equipment from as many vendors as possible."

For Juniper, this appears to have paid off. Janey was not willing to name any local customers but said: "We have customers running production deployments and we are going through the press release process with four of these that we should be able to announce in January...Where this is really taking off is in the education and university space. They have very large uncontrolled networks with thousands of users...Other areas of interest are obviously finance and government where protection of data is very important."

The possibilities of UAC raise the question of whether the technology could be deployed by a public Internet access provider (Wireless or fixed network) to ensure that their customers' computers are not vulnerable to infection by viruses, trojans and sundry malware or to become zombie members of some global botnet.

Janey thinks this will come, but not for some time. "There is the question of scale. Our systems scale up to about 100,000 users. When you are talking about carrier-grade wireless network you are talking about many more. So we are not there yet. I don't think anybody in the industry is, but that is definitely where it is going....There will be the capability to have a certain level of trust about people who connect to the public Internet."

Janey would not be drawn on a timeframe for this except to say "within a few years...If you listen to what the real industry experts like Juniper CEO, Scott Kriens, and Cisco's John Chambers say about the next generation Internet it is all about a much more intelligent Internet. And love it or hate it there will be quality of service attached to that."