New Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch Solution Modernizes the Home/Small Office Experience for Hybrid Workplaces
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
EdgeConnect Microbranch, part of Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform), comprises APs and a new suite of SD-WAN services and builds upon Aruba’s legacy of delivering robust connectivity, security, and zero touch onboarding experiences to the home office through its popular 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 efficiently, robustly, and securely support a workforce that increasingly is remote. In fact, IDC estimates that
For organizations, the key to successfully enabling 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 new 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 dynamically 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.
“EdgeConnect Microbranch gives organizations a modern, scalable approach for enabling remote work and making the home office experience equivalent to being in-office,” said
By extending the already robust RAP in-home experience with key SD-WAN features, EdgeConnect Microbranch is now an ideal solution for hybrid operations like contact centers, telehealth, and IT management, where uptime and security are critical.
EdgeConnect Microbranch is an industry-leading solution that improves upon typical approaches that require extensive hardware footprints within the small and home office to deliver SD-WAN and SASE services, as well as consumer-grade hardware and single-purpose appliances that lack robust manageability and functionality.
New SD-WAN Features and Benefits – No On-Premises Gateway Required
- 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
These features build upon existing capabilities of Aruba’s remote access solutions, including:
- 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
“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
Pricing and Availability
The Aruba EdgeConnect Microbranch solution is available in Early Access and will be generally available in
Additional Resources
- Learn more about microbranch
- Blog: 5 Remote Work Trends Changing the Way IT Teams Think About Networking
- Blog: Extend your WAN to remote workers with EdgeConnect Microbranch
- Video: Remote Work: Extending Enterprise Networking to the Home
- Tech Brief: EdgeConnect Microbranch
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1IDC, IDC FutureScape: Worldwide Future of Work Predictions,
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