Everybody is getting aboard the cloud bandwagon, even vendors that sell equipment for private data centers. The latest example is Juniper Networks Inc., which is rolling out a new managed security service this morning that promises to help customers prevent advanced malware from infiltrating their systems.

The aptly-named Sky Advanced Threat Prevention engine quarantines downloads in a sandbox where they’re poked and prodded for signs of malicious behavior. That’s a much more reliable way of identifying malware than the traditional approach of comparing suspicious file against a database of known virus signatures.

Any application that tries to make contact with an outside server or displays some other suspicious characteristics while in the sandbox is thus automatically flagged as a threat and blocked. Administrators can investigate the details of such incidents using the updated version of the Junos Space Security Director that Juniper is launching in conjunction, which introduces a monitoring dashboard that can be customized to provide a “complete” view of the environment.

That includes telemetry data from the company’s networking products, among them the new security gateways that it’s rolling out alongside Sky Advanced Threat Prevention. The SRX300 packs a firewall and a virtual private network option to let remote workers access protected assets in a compact formfactor geared towards small branch offices, while the SRX1500 repackages that functionality for larger corporate locations.

Organizations can buy the solutions on a standalone basis or as part of a new reference architecture called Unite that combines Juniper’s key networking technology with complementary products from partners. It’s similar to the MetaFarbic bundle that the company introduced two years ago to counter Cisco Systems Inc.’s Application-Centric Infrastructure offering.

Photo via Charis Tsevis