During its Aruba Atmosphere APJ 2023 event in Bali last week, the Aruba leadership took to the stage to explain the company’s transition from a well-known Wi-Fi provider to today, stating HPE Aruba Networking is the only company that combines a full networking portfolio that spans from the wired and wireless edge, across the WAN, and into the data centre, with a security-first design approach. 

"We’ve built security in at every step, and offer frameworks that bring networking and security together, for a no-compromise approach to secure connectivity,” Hughes says.

"HPE Aruba's research shows 64% of IT leaders think security worries slow down tech investment,” says HPE Aruba EVP and GM Phil Mottram. “Despite this, 89% say they need more innovative tech to succeed in the next year.”

"95% of IT leaders see digitisation as key for future profits, but only 45% see their company as innovative,” he says.

This is the environment in which Aruba - now with more than 10,000 people and revenues exceeding $US 5 billion - found itself. Its Wi-Fi range has shipped millions and millions of products since 2003. After acquiring Silver Peak and moving into SD-WAN, Aruba now has over 3,600 SD-WAN customers. The company has also continued to grow in data centre networking, and iTWire previously covered Aruba’s distributed services switch that provides a dedicated firewall on each switch port.

However, it was clear to Mottram and his team there is a divergence in many companies between networking and security, and this split inhibits progress, inhibits innovation, and can result in security being missed, or security enforced in ways that too heavily constrain the networking team.

"When selling networks we spoke to the network manager who made decisions for the network,” he says. “Security was a different conversation. More and more, these are coming together with companies thinking of network and security together.”

Aruba has observed this trend, has listened to customers, and has taken the proactive position of ensuring it is on the leading edge where networking and security converge. “Aruba will be pushing security-first networking in the market,” he says.

To this end, Aruba announced last week that it would aid companies to achieve their network and security goals in parallel, by carefully applying the principles of zero trust.

By describing the function of the network in terms of a global policy, with distributed and automated enforcement, it becomes easier to separate concerns. The security team can set policy, while the networking team manages the devices that simultaneously provide connectivity and enforcement.

And how this works under the hood is Aruba’s vision, now a reality, of unified, single-vendor SASE that brings networking and security functions together into one platform.

SASE, for clarity, is a Gartner-defined term that means Secure Access Service Edge bringing networking and security-as-a-service functions together.

More than this, SASE creates a global private network for your company replacing the typical VPN. It allows your remote workers easy access to company resources and then lets you apply the exact same policies to on-premises workers. SASE brings together software-defined wide area networking (SD-WAN), cloud access security broking (CASB), zero-trust network access (ZTNA), secure web gateways (SWG), and next-gen firewalls (NGFW) / firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS).

To achieve a SASE objective, companies typically required multiple point solutions, and management functions, and ultimately created roadblocks to teams.

With Aruba's new single-provider unified SASE the complexity goes away, and companies win the benefits of centralised management with a single source of truth, that works for cross-functional collaboration and implementation.

Aruba has been on a journey to get to this point, with SASE in its crosshairs for some time. However, a key acquisition made it possible - as well as its prior Silver Peak acquisition that brought both SD-WAN and Hughes himself to the organisation.

That acquisition was Israel-based Axis Security which set out to provide a simple cloud-managed solution for access, security, and control, that accelerated work-from-anywhere, partner collaboration, and digital transformations. The result was an SSE (for security service edge) platform.

"Aruba has always been good at protecting ‘things’ in the network,” Mottram says. “We have strong security offers in that space. Axis gives us the ability to protect people.”

Adding Axis' SSE right into Aruba's core platform now means “we believe we have a differentiated offer that can protect people and things, and we will talk more and more to customers about security-first networking,” Mottram says.

This platform is Aruba Central, otherwise known simply as Central, or more formally as HPE Greenlake Aruba Central Platform. It is where customers provision their networks and devices, and now boasts some 230K customers, 200M clients, and 2.7M devices.

"We're really proud of the platform," he says. “Most of our competitors have different platforms for different products, so we invest heavily in our platform.”

Along with SASE, a compelling feature of Aruba Central is what the company calls ‘time travel.’ This allows a business to quite literally scroll back through the network and see what was happening at a point in time. It can take you back seven days, second by second, providing a complete snapshot of network traffic and configuration.

Oh, how many times have IT Managers and network admins heard somebody ask “the network was slow last week. Why?” - with nothing to possibly go on. Well, that’s no longer the case with Aruba Central allowing your team to find historic network issues as well as current ones.

The SSE component that Axis brings is a huge game-changer for Aruba customers. It means IT teams and end users can literally, say, SSH into a corporate server from any location in the world without first requiring a VPN tunnel or some other barrier. Then these same network configurations used outside of the office can be similarly applied inside the office, providing a single, consistent, zero-trust, secure-by-design, approach to all your people and devices no matter where they work.

Other announcements made at Aruba Atmosphere include:

• The acquisition of Athonet, a 15-year-old company formed by ex-Ericsson engineers, and based in Northern Italy, bringing private 5G to the Aruba portfolio. “Our goal of the last 18 months is to be a leader in private 5G solutions,” Hughes said. “Our belief is private 5G will be complementary to Wi-Fi, with specific use cases where private 5G is key to outdoor deployments like airports, mining, and gas.”
• Network-as-a-service, or NaaS, providing a predictable monthly OpEx fee for network services. This eliminates the need for costly CapEx up-front investments and is already in use at such places as HomeDepot where Aruba has provided networks for 3000 stores across the USA.
• An investment in the circular economy, with products being designed and developed in an environmentally friendly way, with recycling at the end of the product lifetime. “We have asset recycling centres around the world,” Mottram said. “In 2002 we took back 3.67M assets, of which 82% were renewed and given a second life. We bought back equipment and wrote cheques for $1.1b over three years.”
• Greater innovation with continued feature development to optimise IT efficiency and improve the sustainability profile.
• Enhanced AI built into Aruba Central. With an enormous amount of information gathered, Aruba says it is in a great position to make Central more powerful through AI/ML, with data-driven intelligent experiences. David Hughes provided an example of a retail store that found vast amounts of Wi-Fi connections every few minutes, that rapidly dropped. It caused a flood of traffic and congestion. While Aruba Central did not know the store was located right next to a set of traffic lights, it did identify that this problem went away - and more stable Wi-Fi was available - if the SSID broadcast power was reduced, and thus the network was confined to the store’s walls without leaking to the cars stopped temporarily outside.
• Increasing take-up of the CX10K hardware with firewall policies at each switch port, providing both north/south and east/west segmentation and security.

This is the Aruba of the future; importantly, too, it’s the Aruba of right now.

"Enterprises need built-in, not bolt-on security, where security is thought through every aspect of the network infrastructure,” says Hughes. “And I’m excited to work for a company that champions this.”