August, 2010

DEAR ABBY TANG

Networking headaches in your business? Wondering how to speed up your network and applications? Not sure what kind of Network Access Control to deploy? Juniper Networks' Asia Pacific Enterprise Solutions Team is here to help. Write to Dear Abby at dearabby@juniper.net. If your letter is published, we'll send you a Juniper souvenir! Please include only the name, title and company details that you are happy for us to publish along with your letter.

 

Dear Abby,

There are many kinds of web-based games and traffic that our firewall can't identify. What kind of solution can you offer to help us manage the applications being used in our company?

Regards,

Rudi Kannan

 

 

Dear Rudi,

Enterprises are becoming more concerned with how employees use different web based applications. Most of these applications use the common http port (port 80). So, some firewalls may regard them as common web or http traffic and allow users to continue to access these applications.

However, these applications could range from simply accessing a website, to running a web-based application, even playing a game, such as what you find on Facebook. To identify the different traffic types and to manage them, the firewall or IDP device requires application intelligence, which enables an administrator to decide what applications can be executed by the end users.

In Juniper's IDP product series, and the high-end SRX firewall platforms, we support a feature called "Application ID" or AppID, which uses a special signature to identify the application traffic. It allows the administrator to track what kind of application is being run in the enterprise network. Since it is using a pattern matching algorithm instead of port number, we can even detect applications such as P2P or web applications that use port 80.

Administrators can also define policy to allow or block certain applications on the network, while also tracking the volume of the application traffic. In addition, application traffic prioritization is available in IDP today, and will be supported in the SRX series in the future.

Best Regards,

Abby