Transforming Experiences with the AI-Native Campus and Branch Solution Solution Brief

Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform

Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform is a unique platform that’s built from the ground up to leverage AI for operations (AIOps). It brings together all parts of the network— across wired, wireless, WAN, security, and data center—with a common cloud and virtual network assistant (VNA) to provide the best possible experiences for end users and IT operators alike.

The Juniper AI-Native Networking Platform gives you visibility into the end-to-end experiences your network delivers. Ensure reliable, measurable, secure, and high-quality connections.

• Mist^™ AI

Makes wireless, wired, and SD-WAN networking predictable, reliable, and measurable with unprecedented visibility into the user experience. Time-consuming manual IT tasks are replaced with built-in AI to deliver proactive automation and self-healing capabilities, lowering networking operational costs and saving substantial time and money.

• Enterprise-grade Wi-Fi, Bluetooth^® LE, and IoT

Juniper brings these assets together so businesses can increase the value of their wireless networks through personalized location services, such as wayfinding, proximity notifications, and asset tracking. With patented virtual BLE (vBLE) technology, no battery beacons or manual calibration are required.

• Juniper Mist Cloud

All operations are managed via the Juniper Mist open and programmable microservices cloud architecture. This delivers maximum scalability and performance while also bringing DevOps agility to wired, wireless, and WAN networking and location services.

Juniper’s modern cloud services give organizations the agility and scalability to grow their networks with workload demands. Customers get innovations faster with up to 10x more feature updates each year.

Juniper makes it easy to add or remove new features by leveraging a microservices cloud architecture driven by Mist AI. New enhancements and bug fixes are delivered almost weekly without network disruption. Services scale up or down elastically when they’re needed, eliminating the cost and complexity of monolithic hardware. Plus, Juniper’s AI-Native Platform is inherently resilient as the failure of one service does not impact others.

The Juniper Mist Cloud enables single-click activation of devices with ZTP (zero touch provisioning) and claim codes, as well as customizable configuration templates, bringing extensive automation and scale to Day 0/Day 1 operations.

The Juniper Mist cloud uses AI and data science to analyze large amounts of rich metadata collected from Juniper access points, EX Series Switches, and SSR Series Routers to provide actionable insight. With the AI engine, enterprises gain:

• Supervised machine learning that correlates events for rapid root cause identification
• Time-series anomaly detection that identifies negative trends and determines the magnitude of their impact
• AI-Native Radio Resource Management (RRM) that optimizes the RF settings in real time based on changing conditions
• Natural Language Processing (NLP) that makes complex queries simple and fast
• Unsupervised machine learning used with Juniper’s vBLE technology to accurately locate users and devices

The Juniper Mist cloud enables networking and location services to be consumed in a scalable and cost-effective manner. Customers select the specific subscription services that are best for their environment and can easily add/remove cloud services as business requirements change. No additional hardware is required.

Juniper’s AI-Native Platform is 100% programmable, using open APIs for full automation and seamless integration with complementary products, including our AI for IT partners across LAN, WAN, security, engagement, and indoor location.

Juniper Mist Wired Assurance, Wi-Fi Assurance, User Engagement, and Asset Visibility services include a base analytics capability for analyzing up to 30 days of data, simplifying the process of extracting network insights from data and analytics across your enterprise. This allows you to properly align support resources or introduce enhanced premium services. For enterprises needing to extend the data timeline beyond 30 days or access other third-party solutions with customizable reporting for better shopper and guest behavior understanding, Juniper Mist Premium Analytics Subscription services are available. Learn more about the Juniper Mist Premium Analytics Subscription here.

Juniper’s AI-Native enterprise portfolio enables customers to scale and simplify the deployment of their wired and wireless campus networks while bringing greater insight and automation to network operators. An enhancement to the Juniper Mist Cloud and AI engine, EVPN-VXLAN campus fabric management is part of Wired Assurance, which expands on Juniper’s unique automation, AIOps, and cloud capabilities to streamline IT operations, lower IT costs, and deliver unparalleled agility and scale. Campus fabric management helps IT teams:

• Simplify device onboarding using a QR code
• Provide cloud-based EVPN-VXLAN configuration using intent and choice of topology
• Verify, apply, and confirm intent once fabric is provisioned

IT teams using AI-Native campus fabric management can easily onboard, deploy, and manage campus fabrics at scale from the Juniper Mist Cloud.

90% elimination
in wireless trouble tickets

85% fewer
truck rolls

9x faster
deployment times

Juniper’s Wi-Fi Assurance is a cloud service based on machine learning and driven by Mist AI, providing the fastest way to deploy and easiest way to manage personalized Wi-Fi experiences.

Juniper makes Wi-Fi predictable, reliable, and measurable. Enterprises can automate operations, save time and money, and get unprecedented visibility into the Wi-Fi user experience. The network is secured with 802.1X, IPsec, rogue AP detection, and more. Enterprises gain:

• Customizable Wi-Fi service levels: Set, monitor, and enforce Service Level Expectations (SLE) for key Wi-Fi performance metrics
• Root cause identification in one click: Proactively identify and fix the root causes of problems using Juniper’s Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE)
• Guest Wi-Fi: Provide scalable guest access with options like multiple language support, customizable branding, social login, and external portal/AAA/RADIUS integration
• AI-Native radio resource management: Optimize radio settings to assure performance while instantaneously adapting to intermittent outside interference
• Real-time user state information: Dynamically capture packets the moment an event occurs and rewind to see any user’s state at any point in time
• Simple resource assignment and QoS with WxLAN: Assign and prioritize network resources to Wi-Fi users with the click of a mouse or via pre-assigned policies

Juniper’s series of high-performance access points (APs) provide full-spectrum wireless networking.

Best Wi-Fi and Bluetooth LE performance

In addition to delivering the best 802.11ax (Wi-Fi 6) and 802.11ac Wi-Fi range and performance, Juniper APs incorporate a patented dynamic vBLE 16-element antenna array to deliver the industry’s most accurate and scalable location services.

Data collection, analysis, and enforcement

Juniper APs collect data and enforce policies in conjunction with the Juniper Mist Cloud, which is critical when doing analytics, machine learning, location services, and event correlation. For enhanced visibility, several models incorporate IoT sensors and a third radio for business process automation, constant monitoring, and intelligent packet capture to speed up troubleshooting.

Single, enterprise-grade platform for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth LE, and IoT

For network convergence, Juniper APs incorporate a port for direct and programmable integration to the analog and digital interfaces of IoT devices.

APs designed for experience-first mobility network solutions.

Easily deploy flexible and scalable campus fabrics that meet traffic demands and deliver reliable, secure experiences through microsegmentation and group-based policy.

Deliver better experiences across access layer switching with AI-Native operations, enabling scale, automation, and unparalleled visibility. The Juniper Mist Cloud streamlines provisioning, deployment, and management of switches and campus fabrics. Wired Assurance leverages rich Junos telemetry from cloud-native EX Series Switches to enable simpler operations, shorter mean time to repair (MTTR), and improved insights into end user experiences.

• Wired service levels: Enforce SLEs of pre-/post-connection performance metrics such as throughput, successful connects, switch bandwidth, and switch health.
• Dynamic Packet Capture: Proactively capture packets at the time of an incident and store the data in the Juniper Mist cloud. Our network rewind capability uses this data and allows operators to diagnose intermittent issues that were almost impossible to identify previously, enabling faster MTTR and fewer truck rolls.
• AIOps: Leverage Marvis VNA to uncover “needle in the haystack” issues impacting user experience and use self-driving actions for successful troubleshooting. Marvis Actions for wired include identifying missing VLANs, bad cables, negotiation mismatches, loop detection, port flap, high CPU, port stuck, traffic anomaly, misconfigured ports, and traffic loops. Marvis Minis, our unique AI-Native Networking Digital Experience Twins, enable proactive diagnosis of authentication issues.
• Root cause identification in one click: Proactively identify and fix the root causes of problems using Juniper’s Proactive Analytics and Correlation Engine (PACE)
• AI-Native switch insight: Get switch insights down to the port level for detailed views of CPU, memory utilization, bytes transferred, traffic utilization, and power draw.

Meet your digital transformation needs with cloud-native Juniper EX Series Switches that address enterprise demands for a full end-to-end software-defined enterprise.

Simplify SD-WAN deployment, configuration and ongoing operations with Juniper AI-Native Networking to securely, reliably, and seamlessly connect your locations at scale.

The Session Smart^™ Router powers Juniper’s SD-WAN solution to connect users with exceptional experiences and meet stringent performance, security, availability, and scalability requirements.

Built on an application-aware and Zero Trust secure network fabric, the Session Smart Router overcomes inherent inefficiencies of conventional routing and SD-WAN solutions with a tunnel-free architecture. The Session Smart Router delivers improved performance, fast deployments, and operational efficiency.

A Session Smart Networking fabric scales rapidly to thousands of sites and provides:

Improved application performance

With the Session Smart Router, organizations gain highly responsive application performance. The Session Smart Router uses a tunnel-free architecture that reduces bandwidth usage by 30-50%, reducing network congestion and enabling instant failover for voice, video, and business-critical applications. It creates an application-aware fabric that supports load balancing and traffic steering based on session policies and network status.

Zero Trust security

The Session Smart Router has inherent Zero Trust access control, directionality, and segmentation policy, all powered by secure vector routing. IDS/IPS and URL filtering provide application and content security.

Deployment and management flexibility

The Session Smart Router software can run on Juniper SSR Series appliances(Table 1), certified customer premises equipment (CPE), data center network servers, or Juniper NFX Series Network Services Platforms. It is centrally manageable via the Juniper Mist Cloud.

The Juniper Mist WAN Assurance cloud service simplifies WAN deployment and operations, improves visibility into end user experiences in branch and remote locations, and shortens the MTTR for SD-WAN issues.

WAN Assurance leverages data and intelligence from Mist AI, Session Smart Routers, and SRX branch firewalls, providing:

• Improved WAN user experiences: Monitor and enforce SLEs using key metrics on application response times, WAN link status, gateway health, and other network conditions. Insights into how these metrics impact end user experiences are critical to proactively identifying the root cause of service degradation.

AI-Native application insights

Assess the impact of network latency, jitter, packet loss, and other network metrics on end user experiences by application with Mist AI. Enterprises gain insights into gateway health, including CPU and memory consumption, and link utilization levels.

Proactive anomaly detection

When combined with Marvis VNA, WAN Assurance proactively detects WAN gateway anomalies to identify and resolve application issues before they impact users.

Marvis Minis

The industry’s first AI-Native Digital Experience Twins now cover the full stack— wired, wireless, and SD-WAN. Marvis Minis perform automated speed tests to give enterprises the ability to see if they are getting the full bandwidth they have purchased even when there are no users present. Operators can be alerted to upstream network issues and work on resolving them before the end users show up to the office.

Dynamic Packet Capture

Dynamic PCAP (dPCAP) has been added to the WAN. No longer will operators need to recreate issues on their network to capture the right packets. Marvis notices when an issue is occurring and automatically captures the appropriate packets for it. This drastically shortens MTTR and allows operators to easily search for any needle-in-a-haystack issues.

Superior, actionable AI-powered insights plus valuable services that increase security and visibility for your network operations.

Revolutionizing the experience-first network for user and device security, Access Assurance is a cloud-based network access control (NAC) solution that simplifies onboarding clients with easy policy creation and enforcement, and removing the struggles of design, deployment, and Day 0/1/2 operations.

Zero Trust, experience first

Access Assurance is centered around the secure onboarding of guest, IoT, BYOD, and corporate-managed devices, focusing on the end-to-end user experience and offboarding of users/endpoints.

Network policy enforcement

Based on user and device identity, Access Assurance can instruct the network to assign users to specific network segments (e.g. VLANS), as well as enforce network policies by assigning user roles.

Cloud-native

As the industry’s only cloud-native, microservices, API-first network access platform, it removes all the infrastructure requirements needed by all other Zero Trust Network Access (ZTNA) vendors and unifies the client experience.

Unified management

Network access insights are ingested into the Juniper Mist Cloud, bringing greater insight and automation to network operators. This creates a single view to observe all user-experience data.

Inherent high availability

Ensures a reliable and resilient enterprise network that supports business-critical operations and user satisfaction.

Stronger security posture and compliance

Deep integration with industry leading cloud-based identity providers and UEM/MDM solutions ensures business ROI, better management of endpoint devices, reduced attack surface, and increased productivity across the organization.

Marvis, the first interactive VNA, helps IT teams get answers in real time by streamlining operations and simplifying troubleshooting while boosting user experiences.

• Marvis uses NLP with Natural Language Understanding and Knowledge Graphs to understand user intent and goals. It contextualizes the inquiry and returns specific results—even taking actions based on user feedback
• Marvis Actions leverages the Mist AI engine to identify the root cause of issues across the IT domains (WLAN, LAN, WAN, security) and automatically fixes or recommends actions with high efficacy
• Marvis adds anomaly detection to the SLE framework so that administrators can rapidly and proactively identify service-impacting events that assure rapid determination and resolution of the root cause of issues
• Marvis correlates information across a large knowledge base to determine the scope and magnitude of a problem
• Bayesian Inference, a part of our data science toolbox, is used to identify causes with the highest probability of association to the problem occurring on the network

Marvis Minis

Marvis has another powerhouse extension: Marvis Minis. Marvis Minis are the first full stack (wireless, wired, and SD-WAN) AI-Native digital experience twins for your network. By simulating real-world user traffic patterns, Marvis Minis can proactively diagnose issues before they impact users. This empowers IT teams to ensure a smooth, uninterrupted user experience across the stack.

Marvis LLM Integration

Juniper’s Marvis VNA LLM integration leverages NLP for a truly user-centric experience. Marvis goes beyond keyword matching, employing advanced techniques to grasp user intent behind questions. This conversational interface contextualizes natural language inquiries, offering solutions for troubleshooting network issues. Furthermore, Juniper’s LLM integration empowers Marvis with a deeper understanding of technical documentation and support queries, fostering a more human-like interaction, decreasing IT trouble tickets and streamlining IT operations.

Marvis Application Experience Insights

Marvis Application Experience Insights ditches blame games. Leveraging AI and user experience data, it pinpoints bottlenecks impacting video collaboration applications (e.g., Zoom, Teams) across the entire network stack—WAN, wireless, and client devices. This enables proactive identification and resolution before user experience suffers.

Get insights across your entire network—wired, wireless, security, and WAN—based on any combination of Juniper Mist AI-Native data sets. Use these insights to identify trends, optimize IT operations and end user/client experiences, plan your IT infrastructure, and manage resources.

Analyze long-term trends, visitor behavior, and zone movement in a range of vertical markets, including retail, healthcare, education, and hospitality. This improves facilities management with insights into occupancy and asset movements.

Perform long-term historical time-series analyses of network activity, security events, and app, visitor, and employee behavior to enhance business decision making.

Correlate and analyze data across the Juniper Mist Cloud architecture for optimized application delivery. Generate customized queries to monitor WAN performance from campus to branch.

Use visitor telemetry to gain insights into customer/workforce traffic patterns and visitor traffic flow for resource planning, customized notification services, or cross-sell service delivery. Segment visitor traffic patterns with motion paths (traffic flow between departments) dynamically or historically.

Look beyond your network to enhance your business operations, deliver innovative services, and capture new opportunities.

Juniper flipped the indoor location model on its head. With patented virtual Bluetooth LE (vBLE), indoor location is finally easy to deploy and scale, with unprecedented accuracy and agility.

Real-time wayfinding

Help employees, guests, and customers get to where they need to be with turn-by-turn directions. Enable wayfinding with accuracy of up to one meter (3.3 feet) with sub-second latency.

Real-time proximity notification and alerts

Greet patients, clients, or customers as they arrive onsite. Create push notifications anywhere with unlimited virtual beacons. Deliver contextually relevant messages anywhere for a personalized mobile experience

SDK for mobile app integration

Juniper offers a mobile SDK that enables you to integrate your mobile application wayfinding and notifications with Juniper’s virtual Bluetooth LE infrastructure

With Juniper’s patented virtual Bluetooth LE technology, the same infrastructure for engaging with mobile users can be used for asset visibility.

Full visibility into people and things using standards-based Bluetooth LE services

Easily locate key resources, like nurses, security guards, and sales associates.

Track IV pumps, forklifts, and high-value assets with Bluetooth LE tags.

Asset identity

Assign names to asset tags or BLE-enabled mobile/IoT devices to locate these assets on your venue map or integrate location with business applications.

Detailed analytics

Monitor visits and dwell times, with detailed drill down into zone traffic patterns and congestion points.

Asset location and analytics powered by APIs

Integrate your asset tags, asset location, and analytics applications with the Juniper virtual Bluetooth LE infrastructure using a complete and open set of APIs.

With Juniper AI Care Services, customers can optimize the value of Juniper Mist innovations and AI expertise with the help of Juniper experts. Juniper helps customers effectively design scalable networks, onboard Juniper Mist solutions, and simplify adoption. Juniper experts also transfer knowledge to customer teams for ongoing operational excellence.

Foundational AI Care comes with Juniper Wireless, Wired and WAN Assurance solutions, and it includes:

• Device onboarding helpdesk
• Knowledge transfer webinar series
• Juniper Support Insights
• 24x7 remote technical support

All the benefits of AI Care plus:

• Onboarding assistance provides review and guidance for customer design and implementation plans, including maintenance window support for cutover
• Single point of contact technical liaison for proactive issue management, technical Q&A and consultation, and monthly operations reviews
• Priority access to senior support engineers
• Two one-year All Access Passes for all Juniper Education Services courses

Juniper AI Ultimate Care adds proactive monitoring of the health of your network environments and ensures direct alerts to teams when joint action is needed. It includes all the benefits of AI Advanced Care plus:

• Rollout assistance with Mist AI Accelerate Service in the first year, covering design, deployment, and validation
• Single point of contact service advocate for proactive account management
• Proactive health checks and optimization that uses AI to resolve or avoid customer network problems
• Direct alerts for identified critical issues requiring customer action
• Quarterly business reviews with proactive account management

Whatever the level of Juniper AI Care Services, Juniper experts will use Mist AI to deliver a better support experience to enhance network operations, maximizing ROI and the long-lasting benefits from Juniper campus and branch solutions.

Juniper Networks believes that connectivity is not the same as experiencing a great connection. Juniper’s AI-Native Networking Platform is built from the ground up to leverage AI to deliver exceptional, highly secure, and sustainable user experiences from the edge to the data center and cloud. Additional information can be found at Juniper Networks (www.juniper.net) or connect with Juniper on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, and Facebook.

To learn more about End-to-End Assurance with an AI-Native Campus and Branch, visit https://www.juniper.net/content/dam/www/assets/solution-briefs/us/en/2024/end-to-end-assurance-with-an-ai-native-campus-and-branch-solution-brief.pdf