Juniper Session Smart Router

The Juniper Session Smart Router is a software-based router that enables tunnel-free, application-aware, and Zero Trust secure networks. The Session Smart Router is agile and resilient and provides cost-effective and efficient WAN connectivity. Together, the Session Smart Router and Mist AI power Juniper’s AI-driven SD-WAN solution.

Session Smart Routing (SSR) improves both end and IT user experiences by simplifying operations and boosting application performance. SSR scales to thousands of sites, protecting users and data with inherent, Zero Trust access policies. SSR's tunnel-free architecture enables robust security without sacrificing performance. 

A session aware network is a type of network with the ability to understand and manage the full context of a session, including user and group information, as well as the type of application being used. Session awareness also encompasses other critical information to enhance application awareness. This information includes authentication, encryption, and management of the session’s state, informing the network administrator about the application’s status at any specific point in time.  

A session aware network offers many benefits, including: 

• Enhanced user experiences: By understanding the specifics of each session, the network can prioritize and optimize traffic for better performance, leading to a smoother user experience.
• Huge scale improvements: Sessions tying an application to a user are addressed individually for as long as the session is open. 
• Inherent Zero Trust security: Session aware networks often employ a “deny-by-default” approach, only allowing traffic that has been explicitly permitted. This Zero Trust model enhances security by reducing the attack surface. 

Tunneling protocols like IPsec add about 30% additional bandwidth per packet sent, which reduces available network capacity and slows application performance. (We refer to this wasted overhead as “badput.”)

Tunneled architectures limit scaling and are inflexible in terms of their topology requirements. They can be hub-and-spoke, but the hub will slow down real-time traffic. Attempting a point-to-point architecture is possible but becomes cumbersome and difficult to maintain. A session-based architecture is much more flexible and can optimize for both real-time and asynchronous traffic. 

Unlike tunnel-based routing, tunnel-free routing does not add additional bandwidth to network traffic, enabling improved application performance and costs savings. Furthermore, tunnel-free architectures are flexible and highly scalable, enabling faster deployments at any scale.

Yes, the Session Smart Router encrypts traffic. Additionally, it offers an adaptive encryption feature that avoids “double encrypting” already encrypted traffic. By some estimates, up to 95% of network traffic is already encrypted, and double encrypting traffic, which often occurs in tunneled environments, is costly and can hinder network performance.

Juniper’s tunnel-free Session Smart Routing is inherently Zero Trust secure with deny-by-default access policies. Session Smart Routing has built-in firewall functionality, such as intrusion detection and prevention (IDP) and URL filtering. It is also FIPS 140-2 certified and PCI and HIPAA compliant.

The Session Smart Router is software-based and deployable on Juniper SSR Series Routers hardware, white-box customer premises equipment, data center network servers, and all major public clouds. See the Session Smart Router datasheet to learn more.

Small- and medium-sized businesses, enterprises, telecommunications providers, and managed service provides looking to modernize their network infrastructure and improve IT and end user experiences should all consider using the Juniper Session Smart Router.

The Session Smart Router supports several use cases, including:

• Improving network security and performance through a router refresh or SD-WAN deployment 
• Creating a secure Software Defined Branch (SD-Branch)
• Accelerating cloud migration initiatives 
• Lowering operational costs, especially for traffic to and from the cloud
• Fast-tracking and simplifying WAN deployments and management operations

For help with the Session Smart Router, view our Session Smart Router documentation, take a training course, or join our SD-WAN community. We also offer deployment services. Read the SD-WAN Deployment Services datasheet for deployment information.