Decades before the Internet was widely used, one of the first video games I remember playing was a 2-dimensional game released in 1985 by Nintendo called Super Mario Bros. While gaming has grown from those humble beginnings to fully immersive virtual reality experiences today, dealing with network segmentation per endpoint really hasn’t evolved.
The Aruba Difference
When crafting Zero Trust security policies today, some vendors' solutions only provide network telemetry, while others focus on application or endpoint information in an isolated fashion with very limited integration.
With Aruba Central cloud, we help you move away from data silos and give you the ability to craft policies based on multi-dimensional endpoint, network and application telemetry. This means you can accurately pinpoint the type of clients connecting to your network, whether headless IoT or corporate-issued, and then use their behavior for a correlated view without the need for additional sensors.
By using your network devices (access points, switches and gateways) as sensors to send telemetry, Aruba now has the industry’s largest consolidated data lake and the following tools within Aruba Central to give you the ability to take advantage of some great new use cases:
- Client Insights - AI/machine learning-based profiling of endpoint clients (IoT and BYOD) with up to 99% efficacy, and 95% accuracy in determining known from unknown devices. Client Insights is built into Aruba Central, so it is yours with just Foundation licensing.
- Cloud Auth – integrates with cloud identity and access management solutions such as Azure AD and G-Suite for user provisioning. It’s also available in Aruba Central’s Foundation licensing.
- Deep Packet Inspection – we identify over 4500 applications that traverse Aruba APs, switches and gateways. Application Visibility + Web Content Classification are available in Aruba Central’s Foundation licensing as well.
- Network Insights - leverages our data lake to proactively identify and solve network issues and provide you with configuration recommendations. Again, it's another feature that is available in Aruba Central’s Foundation licensing.
Now let’s look at a use case where they work together
A customer in the financial sector just finished buying new laptops for each of their employees and would need to spend months redefining access policies. Here’s how Aruba helped roll this out in days:
- Cloud Auth integrated with their new instance of Azure AD to verify valid and active credentials per employee.
- Built-in deep packet inspection (DPI) ensured that only corporate-approved apps can be used whether working from the office or home.
- Client Insights’ profiling and group tagging ensured that only corporate-issued laptops can gain access to the network. It also provided a view into post-authentication network behavior to identify abnormalities.
- And to top it off, Network Insights automatically detects and offers guidance for VIP users. Issues such as DHCP/DNS are prioritized so that IT can see problems quickly to offer the best user experience possible.
- All this and more with Aruba Central’s Foundation License, which allowed the customer to use their budget on infrastructure versus costly add-ons.
Through years of building our cloud-native unified infrastructure, Aruba is ideally positioned on the Edge to collect and enrich how passive telemetry is used to solve issues. This same telemetry also allows our data science experts to correlate new data sets that previously seemed out of reach. Who would have thought that you’d need to troubleshoot network connectivity issues related to light bulbs in 1985?
More importantly, although we have been on our AI journey for half a decade now, we are still just scratching the surface. I’m talking to customers about what is possible, so please reach out to learn more or visit our website to see what AI-powered Client Insights offers today.
