Aruba ESP Announces Major Update to Cloud Native Services to Automate and Accelerate Deployment and Protection of Edge-to-Cloud Networks

Aruba, a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise (NYSE: HPE), recently announced a major upgrade to Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), which will help enterprises perfectly respond to rapidly changing business needs by integrating Aruba Central NetConductor into Aruba Central. The new Aruba Central NetConductor allows enterprises to centrally manage distributed networks using cloud-native services. This service simplifies policy configuration and automates network configuration for wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructure. Central NetConductor makes the network more flexible while enforcing zero-trust security and secure access service edge (SASE) security policies. In addition, Aruba released the industry's first self-locating indoor access points (APs) and launched Open Locate, an industry standard for sharing location information from access points to devices.

Remote or hybrid office, new business models and better user experience continue to drive enterprise digital transformation and highlight the urgency of enterprises' need for more agile and flexible networks. Aruba has launched a complete set of cloud-native services to address the complexity of multi-generation architectures and the resulting operational and security challenges. Traditional VLAN-based architectures involve a lot of manual configuration and integration work, which makes it difficult to meet new business connection requirements and poses security risks.

Modern agile networks use a network "overlay" approach to seamlessly integrate existing VLANs with cloud-native policies and configuration services, allowing users and devices from any location to achieve secure and reliable connections. To help customers accelerate digital transformation, Central NetConductor applies artificial intelligence for management and optimization, implements business-oriented workflows, automates network configuration, and performs cloud-native network access control (NAC) and dynamic isolation throughout the architecture, thereby enhancing Aruba's industry-leading built-in security. Because Central NetConductor is based on widely popular protocols such as EVPN, VXLAN, and BGP, it can run seamlessly on existing Aruba networks and third-party vendors' infrastructure and protect existing investments.

“In today’s business world, flexibility is critical. Companies must transform in a timely manner to launch new services and products and serve new customers. Since the network is the foundation of everything, enabling critical connections and gaining intelligence from data, it must be inherently flexible,” said Maribel Lopez, founder of Lopez Research. “Today, companies should look for standards-based solutions that maintain technical flexibility and the ability to protect existing investments, adopt new technologies at their own pace, and retain choice in consumption models.”

Three key principles for network modernization

Static networks can no longer meet growing business needs or support changing security requirements, so enterprises must continuously modernize their networks based on three key principles:

• Automation: Reduce the time and resources required to plan, deploy and manage networks with simplified workflows and AI-driven automation for networks that support remote, branch, campus and cloud connectivity;

• Security: As the foundation of zero-trust security and SASE frameworks, it enhances threat detection and protection capabilities by leveraging the product’s built-in identity-based access control and dynamic isolation technology;

• Agility: Protect existing investments with a unified, cloud-native, standards-based architecture and easily adopt a NaaS consumption model to optimize budget and human resources.

Aruba Central NetConductor accelerates the deployment, management and protection of modern, fabric-based networks by mapping its capabilities to three key network modernization principles:

• Automation: Intent-based workflows with “one-click” connectivity and security policy orchestration capabilities;

• Security: Ubiquitous role-based access control extends dynamic segmentation to enable built-in zero trust and SASE security policy enforcement;

• Agility: Single point of visibility and control through cloud-native services. Standards-based for easy migration and adoption, protecting existing investments.

Achieving new innovations in indoor location-based services

The location of WLAN access points is still determined manually, which is time-consuming and error-prone, and can lead to unreliable reference point data for location-aware applications. To address this pain point, Aruba has launched the industry's first self-locating indoor access point, designed to simplify the way enterprises capture indoor location data and transmit the information to any mobile device or application via wireless signals.

Aruba Wi-Fi 6 and Wi-Fi 6E access points use a combination of fine-grained time measurements and intelligent software enabled by Wi-Fi positioning to enable highly accurate automated WLAN deployments. Aruba’s self-locating WLAN access points determine the access point’s location in a zero-touch manner, continuously verifying and updating the location, and providing a universal coordinate system that allows for conversion on any floor plan or network mapping platform.

The precise location of the WLAN infrastructure can be used to create anchor reference points using shared Open Locate. Enterprises can use the universal coordinates and anchor reference points of Aruba self-locating indoor access points to easily develop or enhance applications such as asset tracking, security compliance, facility planning, site experience, and other location-aware services.

“Location is at the heart of many mobile app experiences, and accurate indoor positioning unlocks many new and innovative enterprise use cases,” said Sean Ginevan, head of global strategy and digital partnerships, Android Enterprise, Google. “With Android 10, Google was the first to announce full support for Wi-Fi RTT, enabling accurate indoor positioning on mobile devices. Aruba’s self-locating network infrastructure and Open Locate standards initiative will help our developer community further realize the vision of accurate indoor positioning and make it easier to deploy it at scale. We can’t wait to see what developers create.”

“Over the past two years, enterprises have demonstrated tremendous resilience in the face of major disruptions and structural shifts within their businesses, and it’s clear that business agility is now top of mind for our customers,” said David Hughes, chief product and technology officer, Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company (NYSE: HPE). “The new advancements we’re announcing today will help customers apply AI-driven solutions, evolve to a service-oriented mindset to enhance security, and accelerate the shift to cloud-centric network architectures—the hallmarks of building a single modern network.”

The new solutions are now available through traditional procurement and deployment methods or as a service from HPE GreenLake for Aruba, giving customers the flexibility to align their network needs with business requirements. The latest enhancements to HPE GreenLake for Aruba Network as a Service (NaaS) include eight standardized products designed around common enterprise networking use cases that provide greater simplicity for NaaS deployments and accelerate time to value.