Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is wasting no time integrating Silver Peak with its Aruba Networks branch offering. This week, the company said it was rolling its Clear Pass artificial intelligence (AI)-enhanced security platform into Silver Peak's SD-WAN.

"The integration of ClearPass with Silver Peak’s SD-WAN solution allows enterprises to protect from the edge to the cloud," explained Larry Lunetta, VP of portfolio solutions marketing at Aruba, in an email to SDxCentral. "ClearPass provides full-spectrum network visibility, starting from the device and user connection, and adds role-based access control and identity awareness to the Silver Peak SD-WAN solution."

HPE acquired Silver Peak in a deal worth $925 million in a bid to bolster its edge-to-cloud strategy. The company said it planned to integrate Silver Peak with Aruba Networks — which HPE acquired in 2015 — to enhance the wireless and LAN switching vendor's SD-WAN capabilities.

The announcement markets the first step toward realizing the vendor's integration plans since the acquisition closed in late September.

According to Lunetta, ClearPass was a natural place to start the integration efforts. "Security has always been central to Aruba’s network solutions and is top of mind for every customer these days, especially with the increase of remote working and proliferation of IoT devices on the network," he said.

Aruba's ClearPass offering was announced in April 2019, to help enterprises cope with the growing number of IoT and connected devices on the network. ClearPass device insights is a terminal that employs machine learning to automate the discovery and fingerprinting of connected devices.

When paired with Aruba's ClearPass Policy Manager, customers can dynamically segment security capabilities, making it possible to authenticate and enforce policies based on device type and the needs of the user. Silver Peak customers will be able to identify and block unauthorized users from access applicants or other services at the WAN edge long before they get to the cloud or private data center.

"I think the biggest benefit will be adding more intelligence to the segmentation capabilities from Silver Peak," said John Grady, network security analyst at ESG, in an email to SDxCentral. "By adding agentless device visibility and context, as well as the automation and policy control from ClearPass, SilverPeak becomes that much more attractive, especially relative to IoT."

According to Grady, Silver Peak still has work to do on the security front, however, "the ability to implement policy-based, not just on the application, but the device and its posture is a good start and will further build out Aruba’s zero-trust approach."

While Aruba's integration efforts are well underway, it remains unclear whether ClearPass will become a native security function offered by the Silver Peak product line or require an additional subscription to unlock. According to Lunetta, it is too early in the integration process to say.

Moving forward, Lunetta expects Aruba will focus much of its integration efforts on addressing security — an ever present concern for enterprise — and network management.

The news comes as Aruba sees major contract wins, including a massive modernization contract awarded by the Department of Defense (DoD) announced in late October.

The contract will see Aruba replace the Pentagon building's aging Cisco switching hardware and expand its existing wireless presence with the installation of 3,000 additional access points. When complete, the deployment will include more than 150,000 wired ports, distributed across the 6.5 million-square-foot facility.

Key to the contract was Aruba's Edge Services Platform (ESP) and ClearPass Policy Manager, which the company claims will help to automate and orchestrate much of the network overhaul.