Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) Aruba introduced new policy automation features to its Aruba Central cloud management platform with the launch of Netconductor during its annual Atmosphere Event this week.

Netconductor is a new feature within Aruba Central designed to automate the creation and provisioning of security policy across complex network fabrics.

“The Aruba Central Netconductor is a new set of capabilities built within the Edge Services Platform that provide for the easy provisioning of policy and the automation of the underlying network infrastructure related to that policy,” Scott Calzia, senior director of product management at Aruba, told SDxCentral.

He explained that customers, especially those operating large campus networks, often are challenged with applying security policy across layer-2 and layer-3 domains.

“When it comes to security and security policy, there’s not a simple mechanism to extend that security policy across those layer-3 domains,” he said. “There are techniques out there, but they tend to be unique to vendors and require a lot of overhead to go and provision those and maintain those over a period of time.”

Aruba Central’s Netconductor aims to remedy this problem by automating the deployment of these policies across multi-layer network domains. If this functionality sounds familiar, that’s because Aruba has offered similar functionality through its ClearPass Policy Manager for some time now. Today’s update brings these capabilities to Aruba Central.

However, Netconductor goes beyond enabling this kind of functionality, and seeks to simplify it by applying intent-based networking principles to security policy deployment, Calzia said.

“We’re also making it easier for customers to create that policy,” he said, adding that this used to be a time consuming process that often required intimate knowledge of the networking and security constructs at play.

Now, “I can go define a policy around my employees, or my guests, or whatever role I want to create, and I can connect that particular policy to a set of assets and servers, or connect it to other roles that might be out there,” he said.

The functionality plays into Aruba’s broader goals around automation, security, agility. By simplifying the process of creating and applying network security policies, network operators can reprioritize their efforts and in many cases delegate tasks that previously would have required elevated privileges, Calzia added.

Netconductor is in early access as part of Aruba Central now, and is slated for public release for customers with an "Advanced" license in July.