Juniper Networks NSM Central Manager

NSM Central Manager Overview:

The need for a scalable and distributed security management solution grows more important every day. Security threats and vulnerabilities are increasing at an unprecedented rate. To reduce business risk, organizations must be able to deploy security policies easily and quickly across their entire networks. Juniper Networks Network and Security Manager Central Manager (NSM CM) combined with Juniper Networks NSMXpress allows administrators to create a hierarchical security posture that pushes mandatory security rules to localized regional servers. This allows organizations to scale and respond faster to security threats, ensuring compliancy and business continuity. In addition, the NSM Central Manager appliance saves installation and deployment time by offering the Network and Security Manager preloaded onto a dedicated hardware platform.

NSM Central Manager (NSM CM) is an appliance version of Juniper Networks® Network and Security Manager (2007.2 or later). It simplifies the complexity of deploying global security policies and objects across all Network and Security Manager regional servers (running 2007.2 or later). This robust hardware management system installs in minutes with full high availability (HA) support, and makes it easy to maintain, scale and deploy.

Features & Benefits:

Architecture and Key Components:

NSM Central Manager focuses on three key areas: global policy enforcement, ease of deployment, and scalability.

Global Policy Enforcement

NSM Central Manager introduces global policy enforcement by allowing administrators to deploy mandatory corporate policies across their entire network. These global polices can be added prior to or after local customers rules without the ability to modify them. This hierarchical approach provides flexibility and scalability from a centralized location leveraging commonalities across the infrastructure.

Enterprise

It is a challenge for large enterprises to create and deploy corporate policies throughout the organization. Employees are using new applications like Skype, Instant Messaging, and P2P, which can impact productivity and revenue. By deploying global policies, enterprises can enforce mandatory corporate polices through their network and ensure compliancy. NSM Central Manager provides a unified interface that allows administrators to create mandatory policy rules that can be pushed down locally and globally. Enterprises typically have a separate networking and security group. NSM Central Manager does not override or replace existing policies; it just appends mandatory rules before and after existing rules. This ensures business continuity and autonomy within the organization. Administrators in local areas or departments like finance, marketing, and HR can still manage their day-to-day operations while ensuring compliancy.

NSM Central Manager allows you to append Mandatory policies before and after Customer Rules

Service Providers

Service providers and Managed Service Security Providers (MSSP) are looking for ways to offer new and better services to their customers. NSM Central Manager allows them to extend their services by deploying global services to all customers. For example, an MSSP with a combination of NSM Central Manager and NSMXpress can not only reduce total cost of ownership (TCO), but also lower configuration and installation costs. From a single centralized location, MSSPs can then push down services like firewall/VPN and IDP policies to their customer NSM Regional servers. These services can be preconfigured for each customer and pushed down to them when their server becomes reachable. For example, an MSSP can offer recommended IDP policies as a service and mandatory firewall/VPN rules virus protection.

NSM Manager allows you to create and deploy customer specific policies from a single unified interface

Diagram:

NSM Central Manager gives administrators a consolidated view of all their managed Network and Security Manager regional servers. By simply clicking on the desired Network and Security Manager regional server, NSM Central Manager will automatically log administrators into that particular server. You can also scale to a large number of managed devices by stacking up NSMXpress and Network and Security Manager regional severs with one single management console. Each regional server can be configured to collect their own logs from their managed Juniper devices, thereby reducing the usage of resources like bandwidth.

NSM Central Manager can scale to large number of devices by combining NSMXpress and NSM Regional Server support

Technical Specifications:

Performance-Enabling Services and Support

Juniper Networks is the leader in performance-enabling services and support, which are designed to accelerate, extend, and optimize your high-performance network. Our services allow you to bring revenue-generating capabilities online faster so you can realize bigger productivity gains, faster rollouts of new business models and ventures, and greater market reach, while generating higher levels of customer satisfaction. At the same time, Juniper Networks ensures operational excellence by optimizing your network to maintain required levels of performance, reliability, and availability.

Documentation:

Download the Juniper Networks NSM Central Manager Datasheet (PDF).