Data centers, networking and security all play a vital role in delivery of cloud services. Without the network, there is no cloud. Without the right security, clouds are too risky for business. Without the right architecture, clouds become too expensive and complex.

To this end, Juniper has introduced a series of cloud-ready networking and security solutions and products that enable enterprises and service providers to simplify their network infrastructures.

This builds on the advances of Juniper’s Stratus, a single data center fabric that will yield a quantum leap in scale, performance and simplicity for data center networks, with the flexibility to support fully converged and virtualized data center environments. Stratus paves the way to large consolidated data centers that harness “one logical switch” to dynamically allocate any network resource, including routing and security services, storage, servers and other appliances—without compromise.

Of course, security is a major concern any time the conversation turns to cloud computing. The very nature of the cloud breaks down the traditional concept of perimeter security—there literally is no perimeter to secure anymore. In practice, securing the cloud requires a different approach, one that utilizes the principles of cloud computing. For the virtualized environment of the cloud, Juniper has developed virtualized security that, rather than securing a perimeter, secures individual flows from client to data centers, actually piercing the cloud on an end-to-end basis. Instead of deploying individual boxes to defend against specific threat types, security is a service that runs virtually.

The question that remains is how best to begin taking advantage of the efficiencies that cloud computing offers. For many enterprises, the idea of shifting entirely to a third-party provider is daunting—and it may be unnecessary.

Juniper’s cloud-ready networking solutions make it relatively straightforward to bring the benefits of the cloud—the consolidation of layers, the elimination of complexity—to your network portfolio, in concert with a robust, virtualized security solution.

From there it is an easy step to consider a hybrid solution that augments your internal capabilities with a public cloud, giving you potentially limitless scale.

The new network is here. And it’s bringing the cloud to the enterprise.

Read the Juniper Report: Cloud Computing and the Cloud Ready Data Center