Aruba announced the EdgeConnect Microbranch solution, an industry-leading home office and small office networking solution for hybrid work environments. This securely provides remote personnel with all of the traditional services workers receive in-office via a single Wi-Fi access point (AP) without needing a gateway, agent, or additional hardware at the remote site.
IT departments can ensure that the employee experience is uniform no matter where employees are situated with EdgeConnect Microbranch. EdgeConnect Microbranch makes this possible by extending on-campus Zero Trust and Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) security frameworks to the home office/small office, allowing remote workers to access the full range of on-campus connectivity services, speeding troubleshooting, and maintaining corporate security.
“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.
He added, “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.”
“As remote working continues to expand, IT departments are facing an increasing number of challenges, such as ensuring visible, easily managed, and highly secure access for all workers– no matter where they are located – to business-critical applications and data,” said Chris DePuy, technology analyst at 650 Group.
He added, “Being able to extend Zero Trust and SASE security frameworks to home and remote offices will play an important role as enterprises move their hybrid work initiatives forward.”
The Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch, which is part of the Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), includes APs and a new set of SD-WAN services, and builds on Aruba’s history of providing reliable connection, security, and zero-touch onboarding to the home office through its popular Remote Access Points (RAPs).
To meet the growing demand for improved application performance, reliability, and security, SD-WAN has been deployed to big branches and campuses. As hybrid work becomes more common, home and small remote offices require Aruba SD-automated, WAN’s policy-based traffic management and cloud-based SASE security to efficiently, reliably, and securely handle an increasingly remote workforce. In fact, according to IDC, 70% of G2000 companies will implement remote or hybrid-first work models, altering work processes.
The ability to give hybrid workers with the same tools, programmes, and capabilities from home as they do in the office is critical for enterprises to successfully enable flexible and remote work. This is accomplished with the new EdgeConnect Microbranch solution, which adds new SD-WAN and SASE services to the connectivity, identity-based access control, management, and analytics capabilities that users have come to expect from Aruba RAPs–all without the need for additional hardware or agents on devices.
EdgeConnect Microbranch services address common challenges associated with remote work, such as ensuring the performance of latency-sensitive applications such as unified communication and collaboration while maintaining proper security and contending with a higher density of bandwidth-hungry devices on the network. Policy-based routing, which allows IT to optimise how application traffic is directed to a destination, and AirSlice, which dynamically assigns AP radio resources to specific applications, are among the new EdgeConnect Microbranch features. For example, by prioritising video conferencing traffic over video entertainment, and then routing the video conferencing traffic directly to the trusted SaaS vendor, an unnecessary journey to the data centre for inspection can be avoided.
EdgeConnect Microbranch is now a great solution for hybrid operations like contact centres, telemedicine, and IT administration, where reliability and security are crucial, by extending the already comprehensive RAP in-home experience with key SD-WAN functionalities.
EdgeConnect Microbranch is an industry-leading solution that improves on traditional approaches to delivering SD-WAN and SASE services that require large hardware footprints in the small and home office, as well as consumer-grade hardware and single-purpose appliances with limited manageability and functionality.
These features build upon existing capabilities of Aruba’s remote access solutions, including:
