Aruba Network
Network managers today are faced with three major IT trends that they must address: mobility, security, and convergence. Mobility is heavily driven by users through technologies such as Wireless LANs, cellular phones and VPNs to conduct business in the office, on the road and at home. Network security, protecting information assets against unauthorized disclosure, alternation, or destruction, has become increasingly important in the age of internet worms, viruses, and spyware. Security has taken on increased importance in the United States, the European Union, Asia Pacific, and other locations with the introduction of new government regulations related to privacy, confidentiality, and integrity of financial results. Finally, converged networks that support both data and voice offer significant financial benefits and support richer enterprise communications with multimedia integration.
All three trends intersect at the edge of the network – the point where users connect to enterprise services. The edge of the enterprise network today, built on the past decade of networking technology, is a fixed edge. It was designed for a time when users and devices were not mobile, and for a time when wireless was a point product used only in the warehouse and factory. The edge of today's network is highly reliable and extremely simple. When users connect to a port, the network is there to provide them with instant high-speed access. But this simplicity does not lend itself to security – the network does not differentiate between authorized and unauthorized users, and it cannot make decisions about which people get which type of access.
Today’s network can be upgraded to address mobility, security, and convergence. The upgrade is a massive one, involving every closet switch, branch office router, core router, and even the physical cable plant. The challenge for the network manager is to support all three trends in a manageable, reliable way – without the disruption and expense that a massive network-wide upgrade would entail.
The Solution
Aruba’s Mobile Edge System enables a new type of edge for the enterprise network – the mobile edge. The mobile edge allows users and devices to connect over the air and across any network, to securely gain access to enterprise resources. It is a new layer in the network that logically sits on top of existing fixed networks and fulfills the requirements of security, mobility and convergence without requiring major upgrades to the existing network. The mobile edge is architected to securely work over existing IP network facilities, and extends across both private enterprise networks as well as the public Internet.
The mobile edge by definition supports true mobility where users can seamlessly and securely roam across multiple locations. In addition, it delivers voice convergence through multimedia mobile devices and Voice over Wireless LAN (VoWLAN) handsets with high quality and reliability. This eliminates the significant expense of adding powered VoIP ports to the fixed edge. Further, the mobile edge is built on the notion of identity-based security. Mobile users and devices, by definition, do not connect to the network through a fixed port. For this reason, the network must identify every user and device that joins the network. Once this identity is known, custom security policies may be applied to the network so that only access appropriate to the business needs of the user or device is provided. This drastically improves network security by eliminating excess privilege on the network while providing identity-based auditing.
The mobile edge not only solves today’s challenges around mobility, security and convergence but provides a roadmap to reduce overall costs of the network infrastructure. The natural long-term evolution of the enterprise network edge is to become predominately mobile. When this happens, a radical transformation of enterprise network economics will be realized when the costs of cabling infrastructure and the operational expense of moves, adds and changes are eliminated. This introduces a dilemma for incumbent networking vendors. The incumbent vendors, in order to continue their growth, must entice customers to spend more on their networks. The mobile edge, by drastically reducing networking costs, runs directly counter to the needs of the incumbent vendors. The ‘incumbent’s dilemma’ develops whenever major turning points in technology develop – the incumbent cannot grow business by offering a solution that allows customer to spend less.
The mobile edge is not based on this incumbent’s dilemma. It is an evolutionary new architecture that delivers mobility, security and convergence for today’s networks and builds on a vision where the enterprise network will ultimately have far fewer ports than today. |
