Aruba EdgeConnect Modernizes Experience for Hybrid Workplaces

Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, introduced its EdgeConnect Microbranch solution, a home office and small office networking solution for hybrid work environments that provides remote personnel all 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 extending on-campus zero trust and secure access services edge (SASE) security frameworks to the home office/small office.

EdgeConnect Microbranch, part of Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), comprises APs and a new suite of SD-WAN services and builds on Aruba’s legacy of delivering robust connectivity, security and zero touch onboarding experiences to the home office through its remote access points (RAPs).

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 support efficiently, robustly and securely a workforce that increasingly is remote.

For organizations, the key to enabling successful flexible and remote work is the ability to provide hybrid workers with the same access to tools, applications and functionality at home as in the office. The EdgeConnect Microbranch 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. Not needing additional hardware is an important factor in space-constrained home offices, small offices and ad-hoc locations unstaffed by IT, such as retail pop-ups, kiosks and mobile clinics.

EdgeConnect Microbranch services address common challenges associated with remote work, such as the need to guarantee 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 allocates AP radio resources to specific applications. For example, video conferencing call quality can be improved by prioritizing that traffic over video entertainment, and then routing the video conferencing traffic directly to the trusted SaaS vendor, bypassing an unnecessary trip to the data center for inspection.

By extending the already robust RAP in-home experience with key SD-WAN features, EdgeConnect Microbranch is an ideal solution for hybrid operations like contact centers, telehealth and IT management, where uptime and security are critical.

The Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch solution 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.

To learn more, visit Aruba at http://www.arubanetworks.com.