Aruba Fully Integrates Silver Peak SD-WAN, Unveils SASE Strategy

… advanced intrusion detection and prevention (IDS/IPS) capabilities for physical and virtual appliances.

Aruba also introduced a new service orchestration provisioning workflow to the Silver Peak Unity Orchestrator. The change gives the orchestrator preconfigured default information for multiple cloud security services. As a result, branch network administrators can more easily onboard the security vendor partners of their choice. Previously, partners and customers went through a tedious process of connecting branch locations to security partners’ points of presence and cloud data centers.

“The automation helps them deploy it a lot more quickly with a lot less complexity. The partner’s not sitting around configuring manual tunnel after tunnel across 800 sites,” Kaspian said.

Netskope most recently joined Aruba’s six other security partners: Check Point, Forcepoint, McAfee, Palo Alto Networks, Symantec and Zscaler. However, Aruba has made its platform more open so that partners can bring additional security partners on board. The platform allows a partner who comes to Aruba asking if they can create a solution around a different security vendor, such as Cloudflare.

Flexibility

Aruba’s multivendor approach to security reveals its vision for SASE. The company cited a Ponemon Institute survey that found that 70% of customers want to take a best-of-breed approach to zero trust and SASE infrastructure.

650 Group’s Chris DePuy

Chris DePuy, founding technology analyst at 650 Group, said enterprises are more and more often considering multivendor cloud security services rather than attempting to consume all of the SASE features from the same vendor.

“Aruba’s approach strikes a balance between delivering on-premises security functionality at the WAN edge and providing customers with the freedom of choice to integrate leading cloud-delivered security services from partners like Zscaler, Netskope and Check Point. This multivendor partnering strategy provides enterprises with the flexibility to continue working with existing vendors or shift toward ‘best-of-breed’ systems,” DePuy said.

David Hughes, who founded Silver Peak and now leads Aruba’s WAN business, praised the integrations. He said customers can “move at their own pace” as they transition to a “cloud-centric WAN.”

Aruba’s David Hughes

“Enterprise customers can deploy our on-premises EdgeConnect WAN edge platform to enforce policy from the edge, and easily integrate with leading cloud-delivered security services from the vendor of their choice, all centrally controlled within Aruba Orchestrator.”

Integrating Differently

Muralt said Aruba sought to integrate Silver Peak in a manner different than other buyers have integrated SD-WAN companies into their portfolios. Specifically, how does the SD-WAN solution relate to pre-existing solutions in the buyer’s portfolio?

Aruba already offers a virtual intranet access client (VIA) that serves mobile workers, remote access points (RAP) that can set up a micro-branch, a software-defined branch (SD-branch) solution and now the EdgeConnect SD-WAN solution. Muralt said Aruba wanted to unify the experience among these four solutions so that customers don’t feel locked into using a single one.

For example, consider a large grocery chain that has both corporate offices and hundreds of store locations. Customers can deploy the EdgeConnect SD-WAN offering at the head offices in order to meet the more complex routing needs. But they can use SD-branch offering at the “cookie-cutter” grocery store locations.

Muralt said this approach differs from other vendors that require the customer to “go down one path or the other.” He pointed to Cisco’s Viptela and Meraki as solutions that customers need to decide between.

“We’re committing and converging the management and connectivity of these different footprints so that a customer can mix and match all of these,” Muralt said.

Aruba executives will detail more of the product updates at their Atmosphere virtual conference Tuesday and Wednesday.