Aruba Networks has its sights set on making its SD-branch offering easier to manage, more secure, and even fault-tolerant. In pursuit of these goals, the company unveiled a bevy of enhancements to its service including new branch hardware with built-in cellular capabilities, improved security features, and a new SD-WAN orchestrator.

The company says these enhancements should make it easier for retailers with limited IT resources to remotely secure, manage, and troubleshoot large branch deployments.

“Today’s advancements extend Aruba’s SD-branch solution to further support retail network operators with new, integrated in-store security capabilities, public cloud workload orchestration, and resiliency that retailers need for non-stop operations,” Kishore Seshadri, VP and GM of SD-WAN Solutions at Aruba, in a statement.

According to Aruba, the updates are aimed at addressing the rapidly expanding attack surface faced by branches as mobility and IoT see increased adoption. Aruba has long employed a zero-trust philosophy built around a policy engine and trust broker, dynamic traffic segmentation, and real-time threat monitoring. It has now added intrusion detection and prevention functionality built into the company's ClearPass Policy Manager and Policy Enforcement Firewall.

Aruba claims that by leveraging role-based access it can better detect and prevent intrusions while cutting down on alarm noise.

Aruba is also extending this zero-trust philosophy to the cloud using a new SD-WAN orchestrator, which the company says will ease the adoption of software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications and virtual private clouds (VPCs). This will make it easier for branch network operators to deploy secure overlay topologies in a large-scale infrastructure to connect remote locations to applications regardless of whether they are located in a corporate data center or in the cloud.

Combined with Aruba Virtual Gateways, the new orchestrator extends network and security policies to the public cloud. Aruba Virtual Gateways currently supports Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure.

Aruba also launched a new branch gateway, called the Aruba 9004, with built-in cellular connectivity that can either be used as a primary or secondary uplink.

"Embedded cellular provides retailers with a reliable high performance back up connectivity with seamless failover that can be centrally managed," claims Aruba.

Over the past year, Aruba has aggressively built out it's SD-branch offering. These efforts earned it a place in Gartner's 2019 WAN Edge Magic Quadrant Report.

Despite Aruba's relatively recent entrance into the competitive WAN market, Gartner reports that the company sports a “solid, scalable orchestration platform that simplified deployment, management, and service assurance of wireless, wired, and SD-WAN environments,” but also noted the company’s mixed visibility in the market and limited application performance capabilities for real-time traffic.