FUTURE TECHNOLOGY

This potentially exposes the business to security risks, and increases the burden on IT to maintain consistent access layer policies. They must approach the branch network holistically, which will allow them to easily manage the onboarding of new devices, segmentation of traffic and the ability to meet SLA demands across WAN links. This is where IT requires an architecture flexible enough to scale with the pace of business demands today, as well as meet tomorrow’ s growth opportunities. All this while reducing costs and moving from a capital expense to an operating expenses model.

Intelligent edge Along with the digital workplace, the edge of the network has expanded the game. While enormous sums of money and investment is going into the network, the focus is shifting to the network edge. Merely getting users onto the network is now insufficient to generate returns and vendors are looking at making the edge smarter, faster and more self-driving, explains Osama AlHaj-Issa, Regional Channel Director, Middle East, Turkey, Africa at HPE Aruba.

“ The digital workplace is still our top selling go to market- but the game has expanded, and the game is now on the intelligent edge. All the focus is now on

Inside legacy networking technologies, decision making, data processing and machine learning are all done at the centre of the network. In this digital age with Internet of Things, self-driving cars,

Aruba Central’ s Cloud management platform provides a single of pane of glass for wireless, wired and WAN management, enhancing ITs ability to see what is happening in each branch and troubleshoot issues easily. In turn, leveraging Aruba’ s portfolio of security and analytics solutions provide the context to customise access and bandwidth policies accordingly.

Branch Gateways allow IT to deploy and manage WAN connections, which in addition to wired and wireless management is a third and critical IT responsibility. The Aruba Branch Gateways support multiple WAN connections, software defined rolebased policy enforcement and the ability to easily define best paths for Internet and datacentre destined traffic. Zero Touch Provisioning offers IT the smart city applications, decision making and analytics can no longer be pushed to the centre of the network. If sensors in health care machines and self-driving cars need to wait for command and control instructions, built into the centre of the network, there will be catastrophic failures at the edge of the network.

“ If a connected-car cannot make a decision on the spot, it may be too late to

ability to configure and deploy all access infrastructure within a branch. A simple to deploy mobile application allows any non-technical employees to barcode scan an access point, switch, or SD-Branch Gateway and bring devices up, for reduced deployment timelines.

While the role of the traditional router has reliably served distributed enterprises for decades, many IT organisations are looking for a new solution that takes advantage of today’ s broadband connection alternatives.

The Aruba Branch Gateway offers organisations an option that supports broadband, MPLS, and LTE WAN connections. From a routing standpoint, this provides IT with greater insight into the traffic flowing in and out of each branch, regardless of the uplink. A Headend Gateway is needed for VPN concentrator termination in hub-and-spoke topologies for IPsec VPN tunnels, and in datacentre and campus routing scenarios.

Multiple levels of IT administrator privileges help distribute the workload for environments that can span multiple time zones or responsibilities within IT. It is easy to set up who can see and make changes to the hardware in each branch, or assign read-only privileges to those

26 Issue 17 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS