As the pandemic enters its third year, companies appear to have settled into a new norm: one in which many employees continue to work remotely, where business requirements are constantly changing, and where companies know that to win, they must focus on a need to adapt to changes at some point. When I speak to customers, they confirm the challenges associated with these trends—just notice.
Managing and securing the Network looks different from two years ago, especially considering that most of these networks have multiple generations of infrastructure stitched together over time. Those networks were not designed with these changing circumstances and new technologies in mind.
This needs to reduce complexity while creating an adaptive network foundation is the thinking behind our latest innovations in network modernization. Today, we announced major enhancements to Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), with new functionality in Aruba Central, enabling organizations to keep pace with rapidly changing business requirements.
Our new Aruba Central NetConductor solution enables enterprises to centrally manage distributed network roles, authentication, and access rights with cloud-native services that simplify policy delivery and automate the orchestration of network configurations across wired, wireless, and WAN infrastructures. Central NetConductor enables network flexibility for users and IoT deployments and enforces Zero Trust and SASE security policies.
This announcement is important because it recognizes that organizations must continuously modernize their Network based on three principles:
Automation – Simplified workflows and AI-driven automation to reduce the time and resources needed to plan, deploy, and manage networks that support remote, branch, campus, and cloud connectivity. Central NetConductor includes intent-based workflows with one-button connectivity and security policy orchestration. Security – Enhanced threat detection and protection with built-in identity-based access control and dynamic segmentation underpin Zero Trust and SASE frameworks. Central NetConductor provides comprehensive role-based access control that extends Dynamic Segmentation for Zero Trust and SASE security policy enforcement. Agility – Unified, cloud-native, standards-based architecture for investment protection and easy adoption with NaaS consumption models to optimize budget and human resources. Central NetConductor leverages cloud-native services for a single point of visibility and control to facilitate migration and adoption of new services while preserving existing investments.
As part of this announcement, we’ve also introduced other enhancements to help customers on their journey toward an adaptive, modern network architecture:
Indoor self-locating access points
We introduced the industry’s first self-locating indoor APs with built-in GPS receivers and Open Locate, a proposed new industry standard for sharing location information from an access point to a device.
This means that we have eliminated the need for IT to map your Network manually, and now it will dynamically and accurately update the access point location.
For Lines of Business, an accurate and affordable indoor location opens the door to a new generation of applications, as we have seen with outdoor GPS. Watch this interview with HPE Fellow Stuart Strickland for more information.
New NaaS offering
The third part of our announcement revolves around our Network-as-a-Service (NaaS) offering. As organizations rethink how they procure and manage their networks, the need to be agile and flexible is the main driver behind the surge in NaaS adoption. Last week, HPE announced significant enhancements to the HPE GreenLake platform with 12 new cloud services for networking, storage, high-performance computing, and computing to help organizations modernize all their applications and data from the edge to the cloud.
The networking piece of this announcement is our HPE GreenLake for Aruba or Network as a Service (NaaS). This provides a flexible and dynamic networking option for those seeking a solution that can be adapted as business requirements shift. This latest announcement includes eight standardized offerings designed around popular enterprise network use cases, offering greater simplicity and speeding up time-to-value for NaaS deployments.
Today’s improvements will help customers journey toward an adaptive and modern network architecture. While none of us can predict the next big shift with absolute certainty, we can plan for changes and set up our Network — and our business — to be ready for anything.
