Every college IT organization knows what the start of a new school year brings. Professors and students that can’t get laptops, phones, and IoT devices connected to the network, questions about why one device works better while in building A versus building B, and if they think Wi-Fi is slow. Never fails…
I’ve always felt a little empathy for the IT and help desk teams because they were dealing with non-technical people that couldn’t really describe the problems they were experiencing. And while issues would subside throughout the year, campuses are filled with change throughout the year - guests, visitors and construction that changes the layout of buildings.
All of which requires insights that can help get ahead of issues or quickly get to the root cause of problems for troubleshooting purposes. Over this past year, I found that many of the IT people that I spoke to were interested in finding a way to get better insights for not only Wi-Fi, but for their switching infrastructure as well. It’s not always Wi-Fi's fault that users are having a problem.
This got me thinking so I reached out to Bob Laliberte, Principal Analyst with ESG to see what TechTarget is seeing from their users regarding AI and how it can help solve network related issues. Sure enough, the interest from Higher Ed is skyrocketing. Big campuses, mobility, and smaller IT teams with legacy tools isn’t adding up.
To help, Aruba Central with built-in AIOps from HPE Aruba Networking is a cloud-centric management solution designed to use AI to baseline how your networks and endpoints work together. You get proactive and 24x7x365 feedback on connections, the performance of your Wi-Fi and switches, and even the impact of a broken cable or missing VLAN. Now part of the HPE GreenLake edge-to-cloud platform, IT admins can employ a single operating model to improve efficiency and lower costs.
In fact, not only are network issues a concern but the thousands of random IoT devices brought onto campuses also has people looking for AI to help with security concerns. Interest is so great, that I’m putting together a separate blog for March that talks about security concerns and how our AIOps tools can help. The best thing about our Aruba AIOps strategy is that we’ve built network, security, and application-level insights into Aruba Central – all with basic Foundation Licensing.
Some additional resources that you may find useful:
