Aruba helps network teams overcome scarce staff resources

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has announced new Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) AIOps capabilities that will allow IT professionals to spend less time on manual tasks like network troubleshooting, performance tuning, and Zero Trust/SASE security enforcement.

The new capabilities, which are part of Aruba’s growing family of AIOps solutions, help overburdened IT teams deal with increasing network complexity and the rapid growth of IoT. For the first time, AIOps can be used for more than just network troubleshooting; they can also be used for performance optimization and critical security controls.

“For AI results that customers can trust, the key ingredient is not a mathematical model, but access to a large volume and variety of data to train the models to produce reliable results across all network topologies. Without that foundation, so-called “AI” is nothing more than demoware,” said Larry Lunetta, vice president of portfolio solutions marketing at Aruba. “Fueled by our data lake, our AIOps solutions help enterprises reduce trouble tickets by up to 75 percent while optimizing their network performance by 25 percent or more.”

Network modernization is critical for achieving new business outcomes as organizations pursue digital transformation initiatives. However, with the rise of hybrid work, new user engagement models, and challenges from the ‘Great Resignation’ and widening skill gaps, IT teams must find ways to improve efficiencies. Yesterday’s time-consuming manual processes are simply insufficient for today’s fast-changing business environment. Powerful analytics, AI-based insights, and automation augment, rather than replace, networking teams by reducing manual tasks, allowing them to focus on more strategic and higher-value projects.

Aruba AIOps capabilities, which have been in development since 2013, make use of Aruba’s industry-leading data lake, which continuously and anonymously collects and analyzes device, user, and location data from over 120,000 Aruba Central customers, more than 2 million network devices, and 200 million clients per day. The high volume and wide variety of network and client data, the constant training of models, and the unique ability to provide insights that address both network and security concerns all contribute to Aruba’s unrivaled reliability. This gives network teams of all sizes and industries confidence that Aruba AIOps will automate mundane tasks, reduce the time required to find and fix problems, strengthen security controls, and help ensure that all network users have the best possible experience.

“With hybrid work and new customer engagement models, network complexity is unavoidable as organizations modernize their network infrastructure to successfully support corporate initiatives,” said Bob Laliberte, principal analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group. “When a network vendor demonstrates reliable, real-world AI solutions, NetOps teams are increasingly adopting and trusting the actions of machine learning and other automation technologies. In fact, ESG research highlights that almost a quarter (21%) of organizations are comfortable with software that automatically detects, analyses, recommends, and makes network changes, and 59% report being comfortable with technology that alerts and provides recommendations, which are then manually executed. We expect these percentages to climb as more organizations gain experience with and recognize the benefits AI delivers.”

The new AI-powered IT efficiency features include:

• Aruba Client Insights: Automatically identifies each endpoint connecting to the network with up to 99% accuracy, which is especially important as increasing numbers of IoT devices are added to networks, sometimes without approval from IT. This allows organizations to better understand what’s on their networks, automate access privileges, and monitor the behavior of each client’s traffic flows to more rapidly spot attacks and take action.
• AI-powered Firmware Recommender: Provides IT teams with the best version of firmware to run for the wireless access points in their environments – regardless of model numbers. This greatly reduces support calls and guesswork that network admins face, and helps ensure new features and fixes are implemented more quickly.
• AI Search in Spanish: The same built-in natural language search function in Aruba Central shows its versatility by now supporting queries and responses in Spanish to satisfy the needs of our second largest geographical user community.  
• Automated Infrastructure Predictions: Leverages Aruba’s AI Assist feature and Aruba Support outreach to recognize possible hardware and software infrastructure issues for preemptive engagement that can consist of firmware upgrades or recommended hardware replacement.  

“We rely on the AIOps capabilities in Aruba Central. With these new features, not only can we quickly see if our network users are experiencing problems, but we can also identify actual issues and take steps to address them before any users are impacted, saving us many hours of after-the-fact issue investigation and remediation,” said Justin Kuzara, network engineer at CIC Group. “Additionally, having client-oriented security analytics helps our team better protect the organization without having to use a separate product.”