Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, today announced significant advancements to Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), with new functionality in Aruba Central to enable organizations to keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements. The new Aruba Central NetConductor allows enterprises to centralize the management of distributed networks with cloud-native services that simplify policy provisioning and automate network configurations in wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructures. Central NetConductor enables a more agile network while enforcing Zero Trust and SASE security policies. Aruba also revealed the industry’s first self-locating indoor access points (APs) with built-in GPS receivers and Open Locate, a proposed new industry standard for sharing location information from an AP to a device.
Digital acceleration driven by remote/hybrid work, new business models, and the demand for improved user experiences highlights the need for a more agile, flexible network. Aruba provides a comprehensive set of cloud-native services to deal with the complexity of multi-generational architectures with their attendant operations and security challenges. Traditional VLAN-based architectures require significant manual configuration and integration, are slow to adapt to new business connectivity requirements, and introduce potential security gaps.
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. To help customers accelerate their digital transformation initiatives, Central NetConductor uses AI for management and optimization, implements business-intent workflows to automate network configuration, and extends Aruba’s industry-leading built-in security with cloud-native Network Access Control (NAC) and Dynamic Segmentation for fabric-wide enforcement. 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. “Organizations 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 Modernization: Static networks no longer meet growing business demands or support changing security requirements; therefore, organizations must be in a process of continuous network modernization based on three main principles:
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
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
Agility: Unified, cloud-native, standards-based architecture for investment protection and ease of adoption with NaaS consumption models to optimize 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 modernization principles:
Automation: Intent-based workflows with “one-button” connectivity and security policy orchestration
Security: Pervasive role-based access control extends Dynamic Segmentation for built-in Zero Trust and SASE security policy enforcement
Agility: Cloud-native services for a single point of visibility and control. Standards-based for ease of migration and adoption to preserve existing investments
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