IoT endpoints, or clients, are a growing topic of concern. I was recently on a call where a retailer wanted to use moisture sensors to monitor the plants in their garden centers, which would have a notable savings and environmental impact. Another customer, a school district, mentioned trying cameras from Cloudview to monitor its campuses. In both scenarios, there are numerous known clients or “things” they already are aware of and write rules for.
A bigger problem is getting visibility into the connected clients that they’re not aware of. Smart light bulbs of all types are popping up in college dormitories. Wi-Fi enabled document scanners are making their way into legal offices. Employees are bringing their own air quality sensors as they return to the workplace. IT teams are telling us that they can’t keep up with the onslaught of devices connecting to their networks, so very broad access privileges are given to these unknown devices.
To help, we’re expanding the scope of where AI and machine learning play a role within Aruba ESP. In addition to insights that identify Wi-Fi, switch, and WAN related issues in your environments, Aruba Central Cloud will soon include AI-powered client classification and insights. Reach out to your sales team for more information about these features which include:
- Built-in functionality in Aruba Central for centralized visibility
- Discovery and categorization with similar endpoints for every client
- Inline telemetry and cloud capabilities, which remove the need for dedicated collectors
- Machine learning models that have access to >100M clients and 1.2M network devices
- Accurate classification and profiling with constant re-training of our models
In addition, you can also monitor traffic patterns per client to see how much traffic is being sent, the type of traffic, if traffic is going to expected servers (on-prem or cloud), and if not, where it is going. While it may make sense for a laptop or cell phone to use multiple apps, it might not make sense for IoT clients where traffic should go only to a specific destination.
Supporting IoT initiatives shouldn’t be difficult. These new capabilities included in Aruba Central give you needed visibility for security and capacity planning purposes, provide classification that plays a key role in your Zero Trust journey, and utilize the AI functionality that will only grow in its usefulness as we move forward.
For a brief overview, and an outline of how a large retailer is now using Aruba Central with client classification and insights, read more here.
