Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, announced substantial Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) developments, including new capabilities in Aruba Central, to help businesses keep up with quickly changing business requirements. With cloud-native services that ease policy provisioning and automate network configurations in wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructures, the new Aruba Central NetConductor allows businesses to centralise the management of distributed networks. While maintaining Zero Trust and SASE security principles, Central NetConductor provides a more dynamic network. Aruba also announced the first self-locating indoor access points (APs) with built-in GPS receivers, as well as Open Locate, a proposed new industry standard for sending position information from an AP to a device.
Remote/hybrid work, new business models, and the demand for better user experiences have accelerated the need for a more agile, adaptable network. Aruba offers a comprehensive set of cloud-native services to address the complexities of multi-generational systems, as well as the operational and security problems that come with it. Traditional VLAN-based systems necessitate a great deal of manual configuration and integration, are sluggish to adapt to new business connectivity requirements, and may bring security flaws.
A modern, agile network employs a network “overlay” that seamlessly stitches together existing VLAN segments with cloud-native policy and configuration services that enables users and devices to make secure and reliable connections from anywhere. Central NetConductor employs AI for management and optimisation, business-intent workflows for network automation, and cloud-native Network Access Control (NAC) and Dynamic Segmentation for fabric-wide enforcement to assist businesses to accelerate their digital transformation programmes. Because Central NetConductor is based on widely-accepted protocols such as EVPN, VXLAN and BGP, it can be adopted in a seamless manner that preserves investments based on the ability to operate with existing Aruba networks and third-party vendor infrastructures.
“In today’s business world, flexibility is paramount — enterprises need to be able to shift gears, turn up new services and offerings, and serve new customers seemingly overnight. Because the network underpins everything — enabling critical connectivity and data-driven intelligence — it’s got to have the flexibility built-in,” said Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research. “Organisations today should look for standards-based solutions that give them technical flexibility and the ability to protect their investments and adopt new technologies at their own pace, but also options when it comes to consumption models.”
Three Key Principles of Network Modernisation
Static networks no longer meet growing business demands or support changing security requirements; therefore, organisations must be in a process of continuous network modernisation based on three main principles:
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Automation: Simplified workflows and AI-powered automation to reduce the time and resources required to plan, deploy, and manage networks that support remote, branch, campus, and cloud connectivity
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Security: Increased threat detection and protection with built-in identity-based access control and Dynamic Segmentation that are the foundation for Zero Trust and SASE frameworks
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Agility: Unified, cloud-native, standards-based architecture for investment protection and ease of adoption with NaaS consumption models to optimise budget and staff resources
Aruba Central NetConductor accelerates the deployment, management, and protection of modern, fabric-based networks by mapping capabilities to the three network modernisation principles:
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Automation: Intent-based workflows with “one-button” connectivity and security policy orchestration
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Security: Pervasive role-based access control extends Dynamic Segmentation for built-in Zero Trust and SASE security policy enforcement
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Agility: Cloud-native services for a single point of visibility and control. Standards-based for ease of migration and adoption to preserve existing investments
Innovations in Indoor Location Services
WLAN AP installation remains a manual process that is time-consuming, prone to error, and unreliable reference for location-aware applications. To address this, Aruba has introduced the industry’s first self-locating indoor APs to simplify how organisations capture indoor location data and communicate information over the air to any mobile device or application.
Built-in GPS receivers, Wi-Fi Location support for precision time measurement, and intelligent software enable very accurate, automated WLAN deployments with Aruba Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E APs. Self-locating WLAN APs from Aruba enable zero-touch AP position determination, continuous location validation and updating, and a set of universal coordinates that can be transposed on any building floor plan or web mapping platform.
The precise location of the WLAN infrastructure produces an anchored reference that may be shared with others using Open Locate. Businesses can leverage Aruba's self-locating indoor APs' universal coordinates and anchored reference to quickly develop or improve asset monitoring, safety/compliance, facility planning, venue experience apps, and other location-aware services.
“Location is core to many app experiences and accurate indoor location unlocks many new and innovative enterprise use cases,” said Sean Ginevan, head of Global Strategy and Digital Partnerships for Android Enterprise at Google. “With Android 10, Google was first to fully support Wi-Fi RTT to enable precise indoor location on mobile devices. Aruba’s self-locating network infrastructure and the Open Locate initiative will help realise the vision of accurate, indoor location for our developer community and make it much easier to deploy these networks at scale. We can’t wait to see what developers build.”
“Enterprises have shown tremendous resiliency in the face of major disruptions and tectonic shifts within their businesses over the past two years, and it’s become clear that business agility is now top-of-mind for our customers,” said David Hughes, chief technology and product officer at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “The advancements introduced today will help customers evolve their approach to a ‘services orientation’ using AI-powered solutions, strengthening security and accelerating the move to a cloud-centric network architecture, which are all hallmarks of a modern network.”
These new solutions are available via traditional procurement and deployment methods or as a service through HPE GreenLake for Aruba networking, giving customers maximum flexibility to adjust their networking needs as business requirements dictate. The latest enhancements to HPE GreenLake for Aruba network as a service (NaaS) include eight standardised offerings designed around popular enterprise networking use cases, providing greater simplicity and accelerating time-to-value for NaaS deployments. To learn more about NaaS’ impact on enterprises, please visit this site for a complimentary copy of IDC’s March 2022 InfoBrief, Network as a Service: State of the Market.
