Do you check your work email when you get up in the morning? I do. I also check it when I get home, as I work out, even when I'm out to dinner. This is the kind of culture that #GenMobile employees live and breathe, and more and more of us are adopting these habits.
New digital workplaces extend office productivity beyond the physical cube space and across the wide area network (WAN). User behavior itself is catalyzing this, with folks like myself often going to meeting after meeting, taking Skype calls on mobile devices, and connecting remotely on the go through personal devices. To put it another way, I myself as an employee, need access anywhere or anytime.
For some IT organizations, this kind of user-defined style of networking may lead to a re-architecting of the network if the programming is not flexible enough to support these performance and BYOD requirements.
Specifically, take a look at IT policies and roaming challenges with BYOD, where a #GenMobile employee accesses corporate services on his brand-new iPad via the internal network. If security and infrastructure are not planned carefully, IT will not be able to enforce timely safeguards for the network and meet these roaming challenges.
This is where the distinction between vendors really becomes apparent. With engineering support and service from Aruba, IT organizations can work confidentially with Aruba to deliver seamless user mobility while simultaneously working to replace a legacy architecture that uses multiple operating systems to a single interface that can dynamically adapt to evolving branch, remote and VPN requirements. This network transition is made that much easier by deploying a single management platform that extends Aruba campus mobility to remote and branch users, or as an overlay alongside a third-party campus network, before the complete migration is performed.
Build branch networks without hurting the wallet!
In either use case, many customers deploying Aruba have seen immediate benefits in the WAN by rightsizing branch network requirements using the industry-recognized Cloud Services Controllers. Rightsizing is a method customers use to adapt to evolving network requirements at lower total costs. This means IT consolidates infrastructure to simplify management and security.
With rightsizing, a large technology retailer in the US has been able to consolidate store wireless controllers, switches, WAN appliances, and third-party firewalls like Palo Alto WildFire with the 7000 series Cloud Services Controller. The network manager said that "[b]y recently deploying Aruba, we've seen a dramatic increase in network performance" and that has tremendously optimized their store bandwidth utilization across their broadband link.
On the subject of the Cloud Services Controllers, I'm also proud to announce that we're a finalist for the 2016 Cloud Innovation Awards in security! This is in addition to garnering recognition from CRN's 2015 Tech Innovators Award late last year.
To learn more about our branch solutions, leave me a note below. We'll also be showcasing the Cloud Services Controller at Palo Alto Ignite in Las Vegas on April 3-6 and WAN Summit in New York on April 5-6. Feel free to join us!
