Juniper Mist Access Assurance: What you need to know about it.

Juniper Mist Access Assurance

What is Juniper Mist Access Assurance 

Mist™ Access Assurance is a microservices-based, cloud network access control (NAC) service that enables enterprises to easily enforce a Zero-Trust security model.

Access Assurance solves many complexity challenges associated with traditional NAC offerings by:

• Removing on-premises server hardware
• Providing inherently highly available and resilient services
• Enabling automatic at-run-time feature updates, security, and vulnerability fixes

Access Assurance extends beyond the capabilities of Juniper Mist IoT Assurance, which simplifies onboarding for headless IoT and BYOD devices. With Access Assurance, IT teams can onboard wired and wireless devices with 802.1X authentication or MAC Authentication Bypass (MAB) methods, even for non-802.1X devices.

So what is Mist IoT Assurance?

IoT Assurance provides a simple yet comprehensive way to onboard client devices without relying on a client MAC address, allowing dynamic traffic engineering and enforcing granular network access control. The service reduces overall IT operational cost with Pre-Shared Key (PSK) life cycle management and organisation-level visibility at cloud scale.

Juniper Mist IoT Assurance is a “MAC-less” and “NAC-less” onboarding service that can leverage MPSK as a device type and user/endpoint identity/.

Zero Trust Security Model:

• Enforces strict verification of users and devices before granting network access.
• Continuously monitors and re-assesses trust, ensuring secure access at all times.

Guest and IoT Device Management:

• Simplifies secure onboarding of guests and IoT devices.
• Offers customisable guest access portals and self-service options for ease of use.

Integration with Juniper Mist AI: 

• Utilises AI-driven insights from Marvis Virtual Network Assistant for enhanced network visibility and troubleshooting.
• Leverages AI to detect anomalies and provide root cause analysis for network issues.

Prioritises client experiences:

Access Assurance provides end-to-end connectivity troubleshooting in a unified view from the client, network infrastructure, and access control perspective, dramatically simplifying Day 2 support.

IT admins gain a cohesive view of the end user experience and can determine whether poor experiences are due to client configuration, network infrastructure, authentication, or a service.

Juniper Mist cloud helps simplify day-to-day operations by easily identifying if an end user connectivity issue is caused by a client configuration mistake, network infrastructure and service problems or authentication policy configuration issues. The Juniper Mist service level expectations (SLEs) for wired and wireless clients are enhanced to include network access events, such as authentication events, certificate validations, and more.

Network Policy Enforcement:

Based on user and device identity, Access Assurance can instruct the network to assign a user to a specific network segment (VLAN or a group-based policy tag), as well as enforce network policy by assigning a user role. Such roles can be leveraged in the Juniper Mist WxLAN policy framework or switch policies.

Automatic feature and security updates

New features, security patches, and updates are automatically added to Access Assurance on a bi-weekly basis without interruptions or service downtime. This capability dramatically simplifies and improves service operations for network IT administrators, eliminating lengthy software upgrades and service downtime.

Scaling NAC in Production 

On-Demand Resources: The SaaS model allows for automatic scaling of resources to accommodate increasing numbers of users, devices, and data. This means you can easily handle spikes in network activity without manual intervention.

Cost Efficiency: Pay-as-you-go pricing models enable organisations to scale up or down based on current needs, avoiding the need for significant upfront investments in hardware and software. Juniper Mist Access Assurance offers centralised management through the Mist cloud-based portal, simplifying the administration of network policies, user access, and device management across multiple sites and geographies.