Wireless networks are mission critical. Ensuring uptime and reliability of this mission critical asset is paramount for customers. Aruba strives to build best of breed capabilities and deliver a stable hardware and software framework to guarantee high availability infrastructure. Aruba is always looking for ways to improve the overall customer satisfaction related to use of its products and services. One such nascent effort is to proactively understand the deployment patterns, most heavily deployed code versions, most popular features in use, typical upgrade cycles, etc. Over time, Aruba plans to leverage these analytics to help guide feature enhancement decisions, provide proactive customer notification regarding issues impacting specific features, improve QA & validation processes, software/hardware EOL decisions, etc.
The "phone home" feature enables Aruba to gather high-level data about customer deployments. In 6.4, PhoneHome will be on by default. This means that standard controllers will securely transfer information over HTTPS to Aruba once a week. To be very clear, the information does NOT include any WLAN user information including client MAC addresses or usernames. What it does include is which features are turned on and error log messages about controller operations. The information will NOT be shared with any 3rd parties. Phone Home is an optional feature and can be easily disabled by navigating to the Maintenance tab and select the Aruba TAC server link on the left.
At the end of the day, we respect the fact that this is your (i.e. our customers) data and we want to be transparent about what information is collected. We understand and respect the need for maintaining its confidentiality and give customers the options to "opt out" of sharing this information with Aruba. We believe we can enhance customer satisfaction with this information and hope our customers will recognize the need for a feature such as "phone home".
