We’ve seen significant changes in the technology market every ten years or so. Mobility and the cloud have fueled these changes over the last few decades. The following significant change is the data era. Still, we need to talk about data produced in a data centre or the cloud. We’re talking about information that can be accessed where commerce occurs—where people, things, and devices coexist.
But where exactly is the edge? It could be a workplace, a hospital, a large sports arena, a school, or the home of a remote worker. Users, devices, and objects in these environments generate massive amounts of data.
Challenges at the Intelligent Edge
Moving to a data-driven Edge, like any previous technological transition, changes the function of your infrastructure and introduces new challenges. As they have always been, corporate networks are critical for transferring data and providing user access to their apps and services. The network is even more critical with the edge, and its requirements go far beyond traditional access and connectivity methods. Consider how many things are currently linked to corporate networks.
According to IDC, 55 billion connected devices will exist in the next two years, generating 79.4 ZB of data by 2025. When you combine the unstoppable shifts to a remote and distributed workforce, it’s clear that the network and IT need the right tools to keep up. On the other hand, today’s networks are limited by human ability and knowledge; they can only be as adaptable and secure as the operators who manage them. Today’s networks and management teams need help to keep up with the massive amount of data generated at the edge.
IT leaders must carefully evaluate their infrastructure and operational models to ensure that the network, tools, and operator experience are ready to support business success in this new era while also boosting business continuity and resiliency. They should consider the following difficulties:
Siloed management
The independent management of WAN, wired, and wireless networks at the campus, branch, data centre, and remote worker locations cause communication delays and silos of provisioning, monitoring, reporting, and troubleshooting tools. According to Enterprise Management Associates, nearly half of the organizations use 11 or more tools, which increases the likelihood of service issues or outages.
Lack of Visibility and Insights
In today’s hyper-distributed environments, performance issues can occur anywhere. Unfortunately, as more infrastructure and users migrate outside a traditional office or data centre, IT’s visibility into current or potential issues diminish. The information IT can gather from the network via third-party monitoring and reporting tools is frequently unusable due to poor data granularity or the need for operators to manually correlate events across various domains and tools to identify the root cause. It is especially problematic at the edge, where there is frequently no on-site IT staff to troubleshoot issues.
Highly Manual Processes
IT must handle routine network operations and prevent performance problems using dated tools, laborious workflows, and personal experience. Over 65% of business network operations tasks are performed manually, increasing the risk of human error and downtime. Furthermore, due to the explosion of devices, items, and locations connecting to the network, manual processes make it difficult for IT to keep up with everything in the data era. Furthermore, “automation increases operational efficiencies while reducing manual errors by more than 75%,” according to Gartner.
Security Threats Are Everywhere
New and sophisticated security threats emerge every day. In 2019, 33 billion records were stolen in security breaches, an increase of more than 11% from 2018. By 2021, these breaches are expected to cost businesses $6 trillion annually. 1 IoT devices are vulnerable to hacking because they lack stringent security measures. As a result of workforce mobility and work-from-home scenarios, employees frequently access company resources on their devices and from insecure public Wi-Fi networks. Finally, as more applications migrate to the cloud, whether or not IT has authorized it, protecting an organization’s data becomes more difficult.
Economic and Resource Headwinds
Adapting to new business requirements is a constant challenge for any size organization. New processes, equipment purchases, and, on occasion, additional resources are frequently required. These difficulties are exacerbated in uncertain economic times when investment capital is scarce, and IT resources are stretched.
Aruba ESP: Your Edge Foundation
Businesses must ensure they have the proper network foundation to capitalize on the opportunities at the edge. They must ensure that their IT infrastructure is prepared for the next major technological shift while responding quickly to demands for business continuity and resilience in the face of unforeseen events.
Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) can assist. It is the market’s first AI-powered platform designed to integrate, automate, and secure the edge. Aruba ESP combines AIOps, Zero Trust Security, a Unified Infrastructure, and financial and consumption flexibility to assist IT in:
- Identifying and fixing issues quickly prevents business damage.
- Protect yourself from cutting-edge threats posed by a shrinking security perimeter.
- Thousands of wired, wireless, and WAN devices can be monitored and managed across a campus, branch, data centre, or remote worker location.
- Rapidly deploy network services at scale to meet changing business needs.
- Allow infrastructure development despite financial uncertainty.
Aruba ESP provides various services at the edge, including onboarding, provisioning, orchestration, analytics, location, and management, all of which can be accessed via Aruba Central, the cloud-native single-pane-of-glass for Aruba ESP. Central provides unified management, AIOps, and security for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN operations at campus, branch, data centre, and remote locations via its SaaS consumption model. This model also allows for rapid deployment. Using AI Insights, network administrators can use Central to quickly troubleshoot, identify, and resolve issues before users complain or the business suffers.
Aruba ESP focuses on three areas to lay the groundwork for your network. At the same time, flexible consumption and financing models provide business options.
1. AIOps
Aruba ESP provides various services at the edge, including onboarding, provisioning, orchestration, analytics, location, and management, all of which can be accessed via Aruba Central, the cloud-native single-pane-of-glass for Aruba ESP. Central provides unified management, AIOps, and security for wired, wireless, and SD-WAN operations at campus, branch, data centre, and remote locations via its SaaS consumption model. This model also allows for rapid deployment. Using AI Insights, network administrators can use Central to quickly troubleshoot, identify, and resolve issues before users complain or the business suffers.
Aruba ESP focuses on three areas to lay the groundwork for your network. At the same time, flexible consumption and financing models provide business options.
2. Zero Trust Security
In the industry, “zero trust” refers to a security framework based on the idea that organizations should not trust any entity inside or outside their network perimeter. Aruba ESP follows the Zero Trust principles by utilizing Aruba Dynamic Segmentation.
Application-aware firewalls enforce endpoint identity policies. It can also adapt to new threats by exchanging information with other security platforms and dynamically adjusting policies for network endpoints.
“Role-based access control” ensures that users and devices follow centralized corporate policies regardless of how or where they connect, and built-in VPN support for remote workers extends the corporate network.
Unified Infrastructure
Aruba ESP provides secure edge-to-cloud connectivity. Aruba Central, a microservices-based cloud-native platform, scales and protects mission-critical distributed edge environments. In contrast to competitors’ solutions, which require up to five different platforms and interfaces, Aruba Central and Aruba ESP unify all network operations across wired, wireless, and WAN; branch, campus, data centre, and remote worker locations—all under a single-pane-of-glass and platform. Administrators can eliminate the time-consuming manual process of transferring data between locations or attempting to correlate data across multiple views.
Deploy Aruba ESP infrastructure physically or virtually for flexibility. By supporting a variety of clouds, customers can connect and secure physical locations, private clouds, or public clouds uniformly. Furthermore, without needing on-site staff, this capability enables organizations to deploy secure remote-work solutions quickly.
Conclusion
Today’s network architecture needs predictive AI to handle massive data and make near-real-time decisions. It is the data-at-the-edge era. Aruba ESP combines the technological principles of AIOps, Zero Trust Security, and a Unified Infrastructure to help you capitalize on opportunities at the edge. It assists you in increasing business agility, creating new revenue streams, and creating compelling experiences that delight customers and employees.
ICT Distribution Cambodia sells a wide range of HPE/Aruba products, including servers, storage, switches, networking, and software solutions. Our team will provide the most excellent service and help to our customers. So, what’s keeping you waiting? Reach out to our country manager, Bonal Sam bonal.sam@ictdistribution.net
