What is our primary use case?
I used Juniper Session Smart Router within a healthcare environment around 2016 for a couple of years while working with an MSP at NTT Data. Within the healthcare environment, the benefits would include zero-trust segmentation which helps with any ransomware. It is reliable for EMR or EHR connectivity. You get secure patient data transport. For today, it would be great for telemedicine performance.
Within healthcare, having secure patient data transport means things are going to go through pretty much without things falling apart. This is a software router, so that eliminates having to deal with anything physical.
For today, though I didn't use it for telemedicine, the traffic for telemedicine is really huge. With that particular router, you would get a great deal of low latency, high reliability, and the security for it is pretty strong. It is designed for that, so it would treat the session, not just packets in a tunnel.
When you have a hospital that has to be up 24/7, you can get things going rather quickly. Telemedicine depends a lot on audio streams, diagnostics, and remote diagnostics. When I utilized it in 2015-2016, but after COVID, telemedicine has become a big thing. If you have traditional SD-WAN tunnels, you may have frozen videos, session resets, and call failures. With this particular software, you don't have those problems. It's critical for remote surgery support and emergency consults. You wouldn't want to lose a call in the middle of that, and ICU monitoring. It definitely is good for that.
Where I used it was in healthcare, any failovers or anything that went down, we could get it up quickly, and that is what you want. Hospitals cannot afford to have any failover time. Zero-trust protection for PHI is crucial. We're protecting EMR, EHR, and that's for Epic, Cerner, or Meditech. When I worked with NTT Data, we had mostly Meditech clients and some Epic clients. You can also isolate medical devices like monitors or imaging systems, enforce identity-based access for clinicians, and I think that would really matter. It supports HIPAA, HITRUST certification, all things related to the medical field.
It was deployed as a cloud instance with Azure and AWS. It is a multi-cloud software. You can install it on bare-metal servers as well, but it was a cloud instance for us within AWS and Azure.
Mainly AWS, which was probably 90% of it, but we did have some Azure deployments as well. We had dedicated customers, and then we had those across the MSP board.
I think I covered the ones that come to mind. Overall, it is very solid. You can integrate it with the WAN, Epic and Azure, PACS archives in AWS, and SaaS clinical apps. I'm speaking from how it was used for a particular job I was with, and it was healthcare-related. So how it's applicable to other industries, I would not be able to tell you, but I imagine it is. Within the deployment architecture, you have hub-and-spoke.
What is most valuable?
It's not a physical device, so that is a great thing. Because of its tunnel-free SD-WAN architecture, you're going to get lower latency, no tunnel overhead, no fragmentation, and faster failover. That is great because with traditional ones, they tend to add latency and complexity. Juniper Session Smart Router attempts to bring that down and eliminates it.
The core features for it are no tunnel overhead, low latency, no tunnel fragmentation, and faster failover. That's very important, and it's application-based routing, not just packets.
For example, with EMR/EHR connectivity, we had lower application timeouts and rarely had any session resets or patient workflows interrupted. Sometimes with older routers, we would have chart updates failing within these hospitals, but with this particular device, it really countered that. A lot of things had changed and diminished by utilizing it.
Its AI capabilities do have root cause analysis AI. You can get application behavior, user experience, and session performance. I do recall that being utilized by me. As far as the policy for governance, it does break it down because it is HIPAA and HITRUST related. Therefore, it has to have it. You have unified policy enforcement, identity-based routing rules, application policies, version control policies, and there is zero-trust governance. Its governance policies are excellent, which is essential because of HIPAA, HITRUST, and anything related that governs patients and privacy within the healthcare industry.
I wouldn't know the metrics financially, but I do know it worked beautifully from an IT personnel's perspective. You have a software router that gives you zero-trust segmentation, tunnel-free SD-WAN, and application-level traffic control. It's not tied to hardware. The intelligence lives in the software, and it is beneficial over a long period of time.
What needs improvement?
Everything can be improved. It could improve its security stack with malware detection, particularly in healthcare because of ransomware. Now you have IoT vulnerabilities, so something like advanced malware detection or threat analysis would help. This is something I worked with around 2016 to 2017. Perhaps they have added those features, but I know they didn't have it then. Some security profiles for specific medical devices would be helpful. Sandboxing would be good.
Dedicated telemedicine routing profiles would be beneficial because we have a lot of telemedicine going on. Real-time sessions for clinicians may need pre-built templates for EHR and EMR. I think those would be good if they're not already there. I don't know what the latest router has, but I know they didn't have those features then. There can always be improvements because technology is constantly advancing. It is a very solid router, and that is one of many industries that could utilize it. Healthcare is one such industry, and if it works for healthcare, then that is a major plus for that router.
What do I think about the stability of the solution?
It is very stable. We didn't have any problems with it. That was one of the pluses due to the industry that it was being utilized in: healthcare. What you have is session-aware routing, tunnel-free design, AI-driven operations, limited tunnel drops or rekeying interruptions, latency spikes, or failover delays. It removed that, preventing session resets.
What do I think about the scalability of the solution?
It is a software-driven tool, so it's very scalable. It doesn't have tunnel overhead or fragmentation, so there isn't a tunnel to explode at scale. That allows Juniper Session Smart Router to support thousands of concurrent sessions without any type of performance collapsing.
How are customer service and support?
Juniper is very good with their customer support. I haven't had any complaints. I can't speak for other people. Other engineers, administrators, or analysts may say differently, but I found their support to be excellent with a quick response time when I needed it. It was seldom that I had to reach out to Juniper.
I'd give them a solid nine. I'm not going to give a 10 for perfection, but they were very good when I needed to speak with an engineer via email. Sometimes if there needed to be a Zoom session, then they would join it.
Which solution did I use previously and why did I switch?
We had various types of routers depending on which particular area we were looking at, which data center. We had Cisco and Brocade.
We were looking at Palo Alto. VMware has theirs, Aruba, Cisco with their SD-WAN, and I believe Fortinet has them. The top competition for Juniper is Cisco, I would say, and Palo Alto.
What's my experience with pricing, setup cost, and licensing?
I personally did not do the pricing. I imagine it was okay because the company did purchase it. In a lot of instances, particularly as it pertains to healthcare, they don't want to spend too much. I imagine with it being through the cloud, it was a lot less expensive and maybe sold to the various healthcare industries that we managed, hospitals, and so forth. I think the appliances are several thousand, and you have premier software licenses that can be quite pricey. If you weigh it against the ransomware attacks, I think it can be less expensive because it does work very well within clinics and remote sites.
What other advice do I have?
Know what your needs are, if you want hybrid or cloud-based. It is a multi-cloud type of router. It's perfect for healthcare. Benefits for healthcare include telemedicine needs, so you have low jitter there, medical IoT, zero-trust segmentation, and hospitals need their sub-second failover. It works for retail with fast failover, and financial services. I think of some of the industries that really could use it: the government, manufacturing.
Juniper Session Smart Router is a great router that Juniper released. They do put out excellent routers. It's something to consider, particularly in healthcare, finances, and I would say logistics as well, and banking. I would give this product an overall rating of 8 out of 10.