Arista Networks unveils AI-driven network identity service

Arista Networks announced at the RSA Conference 2023 a cloud-delivered, AI-driven network identity service for enterprise security and IT operations.

Based on Arista’s flagship CloudVision platform, Arista Guardian for Network Identity (CV AGNI) expands Arista’s zero trust networking approach to enterprise security. CV AGNI helps to secure IT operations with simplified deployment and cloud scale for all enterprise network users, their associated endpoints, and Internet of Things (IoT) devices.

“Proliferation of IoT devices in the healthcare network creates a huge management and security challenge for our IT and security operations. The ease of securely onboarding devices on the network by CV AGNI and its integration with Medigate by Claroty for device profiling greatly simplifies this problem for a healthcare network,” said Aaron Miri, CIO of Baptist Healthcare.

AI-Driven network identity brings simplicity and security at scale

While enterprise networks have seen massive transformation in recent years with the adoption of cloud and the acceleration of a post-pandemic, perimeter-less enterprise, Network Access Control (NAC) solutions have changed little for decades.

Traditional NAC solutions continue to suffer from the complexity of on-premises deployment and administration and have been unable to adapt to the explosion of SaaS-based identity stores, users, devices and their associated profiles across the enterprise.

CloudVision AGNI takes a novel approach to enterprise network identity management. Built on a modern, cloud-native microservices architecture, the CV AGNI solution leverages AI/ML to greatly simplify the secure onboarding and troubleshooting for users and devices and the management of ever-expanding security policies.

CV AGNI is based on Arista’s foundational NetDL architecture and leverages AVA (Autonomous Virtual Assist) for a conversational interface that removes the complexity inherent in managing network identity from a traditional legacy NAC solution.

AVA codifies real-world network and security operations expertise and leverages supervised and unsupervised ML models into an ‘Ask AVA’ service, a chat-like interface for configuring, troubleshooting and analyzing enterprise security policies and device onboarding. CV AGNI also adds user context into Arista’s network data lake (NetDL), greatly simplifying the integration of device and user information across Arista’s products and third-party systems.

CloudVision AGNI delivers key attributes from client to cloud across the cognitive enterprise:

• Simplicity: CV AGNI is a cloud service that eliminates the complexity of planning and scaling the compute resources for an on-premises solution. Administrative actions take a fraction of the time compared to a traditional NAC solution. It also natively integrates with industry-leading identity stores.
• Security: CV AGNI leapfrogs legacy NAC solutions by redefining and greatly simplifying how enterprise networks can be secured and segmented by leveraging user and device context in the security policies.
• Scale: With a modern microservices-based architecture, the CV AGNI solution scales elastically with the growing needs of any enterprise.

CloudVision delivers network identity as-a-service

Based on the CloudVision platform, CV AGNI delivers network identity as a service to any standards-based wired or wireless network.

CloudVision AGNI’s key features include the following:

• User self-service onboarding for wireless with per-user unique pre-shared keys (UPSK) and 802.1X digital certificates.
• Certificate management with a cloud-native PKI infrastructure.
• Enterprise-wide visibility of all connected devices. Devices are discovered, profiled and classified into groups for single-pane-of-glass control.
• Security policy enforcement that goes beyond the traditional inter-group macro-segmentation and includes intra-group micro-segmentation capabilities when combined with Arista networking platforms through VLANs, ACLs, Unique-PSK and Arista MSS-Group techniques.
• AI-driven network policy enforcement based on AVA for behavioral anomalies. When a threat is detected by Arista NDR, it will work with CV AGNI to quarantine the device or reduce its level of access.

Tailored for multi-vendor integration

CloudVision AGNI leverages cognitive context from third-party systems, including solutions for mobile device management, endpoint protection, and security information and event management. This greatly simplifies the identification and onboarding process and application of segmentation policies. Examples include:

• Endpoint Management: Medigate by Claroty, CrowdStrike XDR, Palo Alto Cortex XDR
• Identity Management: Okta, Google Workspace, Microsoft Azure, Ping Identity and OneLogin.
• MDM: Microsoft Intune, JAMF
• SIEM: Splunk
• Networking devices: Multi-vendor interoperability in addition to Arista platforms

Availability

CV AGNI is integrated into Arista CloudVision to provide a complete identity solution. CV AGNI is in trials now with general availability in Q2 2023.