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Aruba Cloud Managed Networking at Gitex Technology Week

By Guido Kragten, Solution Sales Enablement for Aruba Cloud platforms in EMEA

It’s a wrap! Gitex Technology Week, which was held in Dubai from Oct 14 – 18, 2018, has come to an end. It is one of the largest trade shows in the Middle East, attracting more than 100.000 visitors who are key players from every industry, government decision-makers, innovators and futurists.

For me, this is my third year in a row attending this great event to meet colleagues, customers, partners and press to update them on the latest Aruba solutions and technology. The main focus for me this year was being the evangelist for Aruba Cloud Managed Networking solutions and there was a huge interest from our visitors to the booth for our solutions. When speaking to the visitors and asking why they are looking for cloud managed networking solutions, this is the list of what they are looking for:

  • Simplify management
  • Reliability
  • Flexibility
  • Network insights
  • Cost savings
  • Ease of deployment
  • Security
  • Performance

It looks like a lot of requirements that customers and partners are looking for in a solution, but they all make sense. And it’s our job to help deliver these requirements and deliver simple business-class networking without sacrifice! So how do we help our customers and partners with our Cloud Managed Networking solutions with these requirements:

Robust and Secure Infrastructure

Cloud managed networks are not only about software, as we still need hardware on-premise to connect people, devices and things both wireless and wired. Having the right hardware in place is important and it needs the right performance, quality, reliability, scalability and embedded features right out of the box. Software you can change, but hardware needs to last for four to six years without physically replacing it.

Next, not all businesses are alike, so it’s important to have the flexibility to choose from a broad portfolio that matches the needs to support the business. With Aruba, this is exactly what we deliver with our broad choice of access points and switches.

Aruba Instant Access Points: Aruba Instant APs share the same enterprise-grade security, resiliency and scalability as our campus access points, with the added benefit of cloud-based management. Integrated controller functions, Adaptive Radio Management (ARM) and ClientMatch technology ensure that your wireless network is automatically optimized for reliability and superior performance. More information here.

Aruba Switches: Aruba cloud-managed switches deliver both the performance and reliability you need for your growing business, while offering enterprise-class management. Multi-gigabit Ethernet ports, powered by HPE Smart Rate technology, means your network can easily scale as your business grows – future-proofing your investments. More information here.

Simplified Management with Advantage of Cloud Delivered

On top of a robust infrastructure, you need the right tools to manage the complete infrastructure, users and services from a single management system. This management system needs to be simple to use, reliable, flexible, scalable, insightful and secure.

With Aruba Central, this is exactly the management system that delivers these features and functionality to run your business with the advantage of cloud delivered. Aruba Central is delivered as a cloud subscription so you get all the benefits from the cloud like:

  • 24/7/365 anywhere access
  • Redundant architecture
  • No management hardware and software to maintain
  • Frequent automatic updates delivering new features and functionality for ongoing innovation
  • Subscription options – OpEx
  • Easy network deployment
  • Easy-to-scale network

Aruba Central doesn’t only deliver manageability for our wireless and wired solutions, it also offers great visibility to improve the business and user experience with capabilities like application visibility and security, content filtering, advanced reporting, alert management, heatmaps and topology, to name a view. On top of the management, we also deliver extra services from the cloud like guest access, Skype for Business integration, presence analytics and user connectivity analytics.

During Gitex, we explained our complete Cloud Managed Networking solution and demonstrated the capabilities live to the partners and customers. Having these conversations shows that we understand their requirements and building solutions for their needs.

Want to know more about Aruba Cloud Managed Networking Solutions?

Please watch my webinar “Accelerate Your Business with Simplified Cloud Networking” where I give more in-depth information around the solution together with a demonstration of Aruba Central.

Visit our Cloud Managed Networking site.

Test drive Aruba Central for 90 days.

Build your cloud managed network in less than two minutes.