Aruba ESP Unifies IoT, IT, and OT Networks
First fully programmable platform to unify IT, IoT and OT networks with Zero Trust Security and AIOps enables organisations to automate and optimise safety, security, reliability and productivity.
Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, has announced significant enhancements to Aruba ESP (Edge Services Platform) that unifies IoT, IT, and Operational Technology (OT) networks to enable customers to quickly adapt to changing environments and user requirements.
Aruba ESP is the first fully programmable platform to generate contextual information – about identity, location, security posture, and applications in use – to power efficient decision making and AIOps. Built to integrate with devices and applications from Aruba’s technology partners, customers can now become hyper-aware of their operating environment so they can quickly adapt to evolving business, visitor, and employee demands.
Today, “connected facilities” only provide device connectivity for subsets of control services, whereas hyper-aware facilities can leverage Aruba ESP-generated contextual data to dynamically adapt a facility to its occupants and operating environment. Unifying these IoT, IT, and OT networks under the Aruba ESP platform, and capturing rich context, enables hyper-aware facilities that are safer, more adaptive, and enhance productivity. That represents a quantum leap forward over what can be achieved by basic connectivity and machine learning-based monitoring.
These enhancements to the Aruba ESP cloud-native, AI-powered platform are integral to sensing, analysing, and reacting to device data and contextual information. Aruba access points and switches now serve as multi-protocol IoT/OT platforms that interface with the firm’s expanded technology partner ecosystem. Virtually every subsystem spanning machine inputs and outputs (I/O) on a manufacturing floor through multimedia devices in the CEO suite can be accommodated – from social distance monitors to gunshot detectors, rotating equipment monitors to guest wayfinding – with solutions tailored for education, enterprise, healthcare, hospitality, industrial, manufacturing, retail, transportation, and government applications.
Use cases with Aruba ESP-based hyper-awareness include smart buildings, industrial/manufacturing facilities and the broader Intelligent Edge.
To enable the automation needed to deliver use cases at scale, Aruba AIOps uses AI and big data to continuously optimise, detect, isolate, and remediate network issues that impact reliability. As sources of IoT, IT, and OT data expand, it becomes increasingly difficult to isolate the source of problems or optimise the infrastructure. The company’s Cloud AI already combines telemetry data from over 65,000 customers and one million network devices, supplemented with 18 years of domain expertise to inform supervised learning. Aruba ESP produces AI-powered insights with greater than 95% accuracy to automatically improve communications and visibility across and among IoT, IT, and OT networks. Embedded within Aruba ESP’s unified infrastructure and zero trust security framework allows Aruba AIOps to transcend basic connectivity and simplistic machine learning-based monitoring. Aruba AIOps is a game changer for improved uptime and shortened repair times.
In addition to Unified Infrastructure and AIOps, ESP generates contextual data that make networks situationally aware for enterprise security. The Zero Trust Security framework ensures no user or IoT device is granted entry or ongoing access unless trustworthy. This framework uses AI and exchanges security and policy with more than 130 security technology vendors to obtain a deep understanding of each device and its role, allowing hyper-aware facilities to fold security activities into situational awareness.
