Aruba introduced its new EdgeConnect Microbranch solution for providing remote personnel with all of the traditional services they receive in-office via a single Wi-Fi access point (AP) – with no gateway, agent or additional hardware required at the remote site.
Aruba’s EdgeConnect Microbranch, which essentially extends on-campus Zero Trust and Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) security frameworks to the home office/small office, comprises APs and a new suite of SD-WAN services and builds upon the company’s Remote Access Points (RAPs).
Aruba said its EdgeConnect Microbranch helps IT teams ensure that remote employee experience is consistent by optimizing the performance of latency-sensitive applications like unified communication and collaboration while ensuring proper security and contending with a higher density of bandwidth-hungry devices that may be on the network. New EdgeConnect Microbranch services such as policy-based routing, which enables IT to optimize how application traffic is routed to a destination, complement existing services such as Air Slice, which dynamically allocates AP radio resources to specific applications.
“EdgeConnect Microbranch gives organizations a modern, scalable approach for enabling remote work and making the home office experience equivalent to being in-office,” said Larry Lunetta, VP of Solutions Portfolio Marketing at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company. “While some may believe that the only network service that can be extended to the home office AP/router is security – and even that requires an extra box, EdgeConnect Microbranch demonstrates that, with a cloud-based approach, all critical network services can be extended to the home office solely through an access point.”
Key features:
- Policy-based routing: Allows IT to deliver application performance and security based on automated rules to meet service-level agreements (SLAs) for specific applications, websites or types of users
- Tunnel and route orchestration: Optimizes network performance by orchestrating VPN tunnels on demand and automatically rerouting traffic to the network path that will provide the best performance
- SASE integration: Provides secure connectivity to cloud security services such as Zscaler directly via the AP and with Aruba Central providing orchestration of tunnels and unified configuration management
- Enhanced WAN visibility: Accelerates troubleshooting and improves the user experience by providing near real-time updates on WAN availability, utilization, and throughput by detecting latency, jitter, and other connectivity issues impacting the ISP that have traditionally been hidden from IT teams
- Traffic prioritization: Assigns radio resources to an application and dynamically changes assignments as application sessions begin or end
- Massive scalability: Supports zero touch deployment and consolidated management for tens of thousands of remote workers via Aruba Central’s cloud-based services and AOS 10
- Improved uptime and reliability: Provides for LTE backup via a USB interface should the home or small office lose ISP connectivity
The Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch solution is available in Early Access and will be generally available in March 2022 for any AP running ArubaOS 10 with a Foundation AP License (including qualified APs customers already own and manage in Central.) Aruba Central Foundation Licenses are available for $145 per AP. AP pricing varies per model and starts at $575.00 US for the Aruba 303H Series.