A Unified Infrastructure for Increasingly Stratified Business Environments

By Mason Coffman, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company.

The circumstances of the past 18 months have made an indelible impact on the enterprise and has challenged traditional business models. Early in the flight to work-from-home scenarios, organizations had to adapt quickly to changing requirements to ensure business continuity.

Today, armed with lessons learned, enterprises are not only adapting to and thriving amidst new business realities, many organizations are also increasing investment in technologies. The objective: to yield a more flexible and resilient IT infrastructure to prepare for any major business disruptions in the future.

Supporting employees and transactions securely and reliably is the ultimate goal. Not only are applications and workloads distributed across the data center and the cloud, but users themselves are dispersed across the campus, data center, branch, and remote worker locations. Meanwhile, the network has also become more fragmented, with multiple architectures and disparate management tools that can impede IT service delivery across these dispersed locations and workflows.

The resulting IT complexity can offset the intended benefits of adopting technologies such as Internet of Things (IoT) and cloud, while negatively impacting employee productivity and even the end-customer experience. With organizations undergoing digital transformation, IT teams are under more pressure than ever to automate and implement technologies and solutions that streamline operations and reduce IT complexity.

Cloud-native Management Capabilities for a Unified Infrastructure

One way to reduce IT complexity is to deploy a unified infrastructure, one that can be centrally managed via a single point of control. Customers can realize this network simplification through ongoing advancements to Aruba Central, our cloud-native management solution, and ArubaOS 10 (AOS 10), a unified network operating system that brings together WLAN and SD-Branch capabilities. In this manner, IT can effectively manage a distributed network environment across microbranch, branch, and campus environments, all the while delivering a high-quality user experience within a single architecture, orchestrated from one management console.

At Aruba, we have added new cloud-native management capabilities to create a more unified network infrastructure via Aruba Central, which also serves as the foundation for the recently announced HPE Compute Cloud Console. Those capabilities include:

• Self-healing AIOps that deliver on the promise of closed-loop remediation, so problems are automatically surfaced and fixed before end users or business performance are impacted, without requiring any manual effort on the behalf of IT operators.
• A new IoT Operations service that extends network monitoring capabilities to sensors, connectors, and other IoT infrastructure, along with an integrated app store that enables customers to deploy best-of-breed applications from Aruba IoT partners in a few clicks.
• New cloud-based authentication and policy capabilities that provide automated, secure network connectivity for end users across a wide range of devices, including SIM-enabled clients – providing a seamless user experience while easing operations for IT admins who manage network access.

Working in concert, these advancements further Aruba’s vision of delivering a unified infrastructure and new levels of operational simplicity so that IT teams can redirect precious resources to more business-critical areas.

Simplified and Unified

In short, network infrastructure and operations teams have never been more stretched. More remote workers, the rapid growth of IoT connected devices, and a continuing need to provide secure connectivity to services hosted in the cloud and data centers are creating operational complexity, and taken together, represent unyielding demands on the network.

Through Aruba ESP and its growing roster of unified network infrastructure solutions, organizations can improve IT efficiency and agility, enabling teams to better support the growing demands and complexities of enterprises that operate in the global economy.

Want to learn more about new unified infrastructure capabilities from Aruba?