Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has introduced its new EdgeConnect Microbranch solution, an industry-leading home office and small office networking solution for hybrid work environments that securely provides remote personnel all of the traditional services workers receive in-office via a single Wi-Fi access point (AP) – with no gateway, agent or additional hardware required at the remote site.
With EdgeConnect Microbranch, IT departments can ensure the employee experience is consistent no matter where workers are located. EdgeConnect Microbranch enables this by delivering the full range of on-campus connectivity services to remote workers, accelerating troubleshooting, and maintaining corporate protections by seamlessly extending on-campus Zero Trust and Secure Access Services Edge (SASE) security frameworks to the home office/small office.
SD-WAN has been added to large branches and campuses to deal with the increasing demands for higher application performance, reliability, and security. Now, as hybrid work becomes the norm, home and small remote offices need the automated, policy-based traffic management and cloud-based SASE security of Aruba SD-WAN to efficiently, robustly, and securely support a workforce that increasingly is remote.
For organisations, the key to successfully enabling flexible and remote work is the ability to provide hybrid workerswith the same access to tools, applications, and functionality at home as in the office. The new EdgeConnectMicrobranch solution does this by adding new SD-WAN and SASE services to the connectivity, identity-based access control, management, and analytics capabilities users have enjoyed with Aruba RAPs – without the need for additional hardware on premises or agents on devices.
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 organisations 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.”
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.
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