Aruba ESP AIOps Capabilities Debut

July 27, 2022

The new Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) AIOps capabilities allow IT professionals to greatly reduce the time spent on manual tasks such as network troubleshooting, performance tuning, and Zero Trust/SASE security enforcement. Part of Aruba’s growing family of AIOps solutions, the new capabilities supplement overtaxed IT teams as they grapple with increasing network complexity and the rapid growth of IoT. For the first time, AIOps can be utilized for not just network troubleshooting but also performance optimization and critical security controls.

As organizations pursue digital transformation initiatives, network modernization is critical for achieving new business outcomes. However, with the growth of hybrid work, new user engagement models, and challenges resulting from the ‘Great Resignation’ and widening skills gaps, IT teams must find ways to achieve greater efficiencies. Yesterday’s time-intensive manual processes are simply inadequate for today’s quickly-changing business environment. Powerful analytics, AI-based insights, and automation supplement – not replace – networking teams by reducing manual tasks so they can focus on more strategic and higher-value projects.

In development since 2013, Aruba AIOps capabilities leverage 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, from more than 2 million network devices and 200 million clients per day. The unmatched reliability of Aruba’s AI is directly related to the high volume and wide variety of network and client data, the constant training of models, and the unique ability to provide insights that tackle both network and security concerns. This allows network teams from every industry and size to trust that Aruba AIOps will automate mundane tasks, shrink the time needed to find and fix problems, increase security controls, and help ensure that all network users have the best possible experience.

“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.”

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.

“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.”

“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.”

Pricing and Availability

Aruba Client Insights is available now. AI Search, AI-powered Firmware Recommender, and Infrastructure Predictions are available for early access and will be generally available in October 2022. Each of these features are included in Aruba Central Foundation licensing.