Harnessing the Power of the Edge with Aruba ESP
Over the past few decades, the technology market has undergone major shifts. Those shifts have been driven by mobility and the cloud. Now we’re entering the next big shift: the era of data—but we’re not talking about data that’s generated in a cloud or a data center. We’re talking about data that is available where business is done—where users, devices, and things all come together. We call that the Edge.
But where exactly is the Edge? It could be a workplace, a hospital, a large sports stadium, a school, or a remote worker’s home. In these environments, massive amounts of data is generated by users, devices, and things. Organizations that successfully harness that data—harness it by analyzing and acting on it in real time—can reveal valuable insights and deliver new services. More than that, they can delight their customers or produce better outcomes. They can win. And those that can’t, will lose.
So, the stakes are high. And the question becomes—do you have the right foundation in place to successfully win at the Edge? The network is critical in making use of all this data and will be what separates business leaders from the laggards.
New and advanced security threats are emerging every day. In 2019, security breaches increased over 11% from 2018 resulting in 33B records being stolen, which is expected to cost businesses $6T annually by 2021.1 IoT devices aren’t equipped with stringent security measures and are easy for hackers to exploit. Meanwhile, workforce mobility and work from home scenarios continue to expand the IT perimeter, as employees often access corporate resources on personal devices and from public Wi-Fi networks that aren’t secure. Lastly, with more applications moving to the cloud – whether sanctioned by IT or not – protecting an organization’s data has become even more challenging.
Given the importance of capitalizing on the opportunities at the Edge, it’s critical for businesses to ensure that they have the right network foundation. They need to prepare their IT infrastructure for the next big technology transition while ensuring they can quickly respond to the need for business continuity and resiliency in the face of unplanned events.
That’s where Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) comes in. It’s the industry’s first AI-powered platform designed to unify, automate, and secure the Edge. Aruba ESP combines AIOps, Zero Trust Security, and a Unified Infrastructure, with financial and consumption flexibility to help IT: Identify and resolve issues quickly, preempting problems before they impact the business; Protect against advanced threats from a vanishing security perimeter; Monitor and manage thousands of wired, wireless and WAN devices across campus, branch, data center, or remote worker locations; Quickly deploy network services at scale to support changing business needs; and Allow continued infrastructure investment in the face of uncertain financial challenges.
Aruba ESP offers services at the Edge that include onboarding, provisioning, orchestration, analytics, location, and management, which can all be accessed using Aruba Central—the cloud-native single-pane-of-glass for Aruba ESP. Central’s SaaS consumption model enables rapid deployment and provides unified management, AIOps, and security for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN operations across campus, branch, data center, and remote locations. Through Central, network admins can use AI Insights to help quickly troubleshoot, identify, and resolve issues before users complain or the business suffers.
