• • New Aruba AIOps and SASE capabilities help IT teams understand and manage what’s on their network.
  • ESG principal analyst Bob Laliberte told SDxCentral that "operations teams need to have solutions that help drive that efficiency."
  • Aruba new additions include: Client Insights, AI-powered Firmware Recommender, AI Search in Spanish, Automated Infrastructure Predictions.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Aruba added new AIOps capabilities to its Edge Services Platform (ESP) to help IT teams improve efficiency in network performance optimization, IoT profiling, and zero trust and secure access service edge (SASE) security enforcement.

As the IT environment is becoming increasingly distributed and complex, “operations teams need to have solutions that help drive that efficiency,” which is the top goal of organizations’ digital transformation efforts, ESG principal analyst Bob Laliberte told SDxCentral. 

Meanwhile, with the rapid growth of IoT, customers started asking Aruba for better ways to handle IoT vulnerabilities around two years ago, Trent Fierro, senior marketing manager for cloud and AIOps for Aruba, said. That’s why Aruba decided to enhance AIOps capabilities for both network and security challenges. 

Earlier this year, Aruba added policy automation features to its Aruba Central cloud management platform with the launch of Netconductor. The new AIOps capabilities, including the Client Insights, artificial intelligence (AI)-powered firmware recommender, search function supporting queries and responses in Spanish, and infrastructure predictions, will also be managed by Aruba Central Cloud.

With the Client Insights service, Aruba expands its network insights to automatically identify each endpoint connecting to the network, which addresses one of IT teams’ largest concerns, Fierro noted.

The service provides anomaly and coverage hole spotting in WiFi and wired networks, recommendations to fix the problem, and WAN predictions, all powered by AI and built into the Aruba Central Cloud dashboard.

Those capabilities can help enforce zero-trust and SASE security. “You're taking advantage of zero-trust capabilities with the fact that you know what kind of clients are coming onto the network … [with] 99% profiling accuracy in some situations,” Fierro explained.

“The inability to see what's there is a big issue for both zero-trust or a SASE framework,” echoed Larry Lunetta, VP of WLAN and security solutions marketing at Aruba. “So this is the on-ramp for IoT to get identified to be assigned to policy and to have its track traffic segmented to the right places as they transact.”

The network has a lot of great information that can be shared with security teams, and “you're starting to see more and more solutions that are coming out that have the ability with role-based access control (RBAC),” Laliberte noted.

All those AIOps capabilities are based on Aruba's data lake, which collects and analyzes user, device, and location data from more than 120,000 Aruba Central customers, over 2 million network devices, and 200 million types of endpoints, according to Fierro.

“Not only is it network troubleshooting, we're the first to offer network optimization, because we can go into the 120 [thousand] different customer sites and start categorizing peers,” he touted. “We're collecting data from over 30 different verticals that extend from enterprises to amusement parks.”

Compared to smaller vendors, the size and variety of that data lake mean Aruba has better data to train the AI models to be more accurate, reliable, and applicable, Lunetta said.

Plus, Aruba combines and consolidates insights from both the network and security side via the AIOps capabilities, and “that's where we think we have an advantage over the bigger vendors,” he added. “They haven't yet consolidated it in to the point where it's driving both networking and security at the same time and presenting the results in a unified interface.”

“We see a market change now that customers are going from AI is sort of exotic and maybe something in the future to something they have to have now,” Lunetta concluded. “We're entering a new phase of the market where AIOps ability, trust, data, accuracy, etc. are the real essence of how customers choose AI solutions.”