UPDATED 08:00 EDT / DECEMBER 07 2021

CLOUD

Aruba extends remote-work network support to home offices

Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.’s Aruba networking subsidiary is making it easier for enterprises to manage and secure home- and small-office environments with a software upgrade being announced today,

The company said it delivers in-office-like services to home workers via a single Wi-Fi access point without the need for a gateway, agent or additional hardware. The new EdgeConnect Microbranch solution also extends on-campus zero-trust and secure access service edge security frameworks to small remote locations.

The new offering addresses the need for enterprises to guarantee the performance of latency-sensitive applications without sacrificing security or competing with other bandwidth-intensive applications and devices. It does that through policy-based routing, which enables the information technology department to set priorities for traffic and optimize how it’s routed to a destination. That’s combined with a feature on the company’s Air Slice radio frequency technology that dynamically allocates access point radio resources to specific applications.

“For example, if the service-level agreement is to make sure workers have the best Zoom experience IT can prioritize rules to take different actions with Zoom traffic,” said Eve-Marie Laza, senior solutions marketing manager for edge, “internet of things” and hybrid workplace at HPE. “It provides a greater parity of work without the additional complexities of managing hardware.”

Aruba already sells a software-defined branch offering for larger remote offices that requires dedicated hardware for routing and management. The new capabilities leverage Aruba Central, a network management platform, to deliver services automatically to all devices running the Aruba OS 10 operating system. “If an organization has already deployed remote access points to tens of thousands of contact centers and is using Aruba Central, these capabilities will be added right in” when they become generally available in March, Laza said.

The microbranch features also optimize network performance by orchestrating virtual private network tunnels on demand and automatically rerouting traffic to the network path that provides the best performance. Automated tunneling and router optimization “tune the pipes for performance and routes dynamically, so if a corporate resource is down the traffic can be automatically re-routed around that blockage,” Laza said.

Near-real-time updates on WAN availability, utilization and throughput simplify troubleshooting by detecting latency, jitter and other connectivity issues in the user’s connection to an internet service provider are difficult for IT administrators to see.

HPE Aruba is providing SASE integration through secure connectivity initially with Zscaler Inc.’s SASE service with Aruba Central providing orchestration of tunnels and unified configuration management. “A secure tunnel is established directly to the SASE cloud. There’s no need to download and install an endpoint agent on a client device,” Laza said. Support for other vendors’ products will “likely” be added in the future, she said.

The feature is available now under an early access program and will be generally released in March 2022 for any Aruba access point running AOS 10 with a Foundation Access Point License. Aruba Central Foundation Licenses cost $145 per access point, with the pricing of individual access points varying by model and starting at $575.

Photo: Pixabay

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