Top 5 Reasons for Cloud Networking

Trent Fierro | September 22, 2021

For organizations today, automation, a reliable network, and a great user experience can make the difference between keeping employees and guests, or battling it out for skilled talent and market share. Aruba ESP with Aruba Central cloud helps fast track new hybrid workplace, IoT and work from home services that can make a difference.

Customers are surprising me with how often—and quickly—they’re making the shift to cloud-based management systems to position their IT teams for success. I’m hearing a common set of reasons across verticals and size of organizations so I thought I’d share. Maybe these five reasons will reshape your own cloud thinking, where possible.

1. Artificial intelligence for IT Operations (AIOps) has come a long way
Cloud networking offers virtually unlimited compute and storage capacity that is needed to efficiently baseline and network and automatically identify performance gaps and on-going issues. What’s not to like about features that help IT pinpoint issues more quickly, accurately determine what type of endpoint clients are on your network, and offer performance tips that preempt issues.

With the ability to gather telemetry from networks from all over the world it’s easy for customers to see the following benefits:

• They can quickly gain access to insights about their sites and locations that would have taken days, weeks or months to uncover.
• Capturing device and endpoint client telemetry doesn’t require immediate upgrades or investments to their existing infrastructure.
• Site comparisons offer more than troubleshooting. Imagine automatically being told that one out 25 remote sites is not performing like the others. No on-site visits or help desk calls.

2. The cloud helps with network staff efficiency
Most organizations are running lean and mean today so Aruba Central cloud supports that model. When your management system sits in the cloud, network admins are not worrying about appliance and software upgrades, cooling, or if someone happens to mistakenly unplug or take down a server without notice. The team also benefits in the following ways:

• Internal resources can spend less time in front of a monitor troubleshooting issues, and more time working on new initiatives.
• Zero touch provisioning means new infrastructure is installed faster, and with fewer missteps.

3. Cloud-based management offers scale
On-premises solutions require compute, storage and networking resources that need to be sized accordingly, which can mean 5, 10, or more appliances in some instances. Maintaining these resources and resolving any issues that come up takes time and lots of energy. With cloud-based solutions, all that is needed is to put your access points, switches, and gateways under management, and Aruba Central cloud scales based on your needs.

4. Support tools work well from the cloud
Live Chat in Aruba Central cloud and other automated support tools bring 24-hour availability that helps an IT team engage with Aruba TAC for those hard to solve problems. A log capture that gets saved to the cloud provides a way to share that may not have been just a few years ago. Times are changing, so for many organizations these cloud-based services are fast becoming frontline support as they triage and address questions or issues.

5. Quality analytics and the valuable insights
Data has always been a strategic asset, but the cloud offers new possibilities. I mentioned how we use the cloud to help gather needed telemetry for accurate AI and machine learning algorithms earlier.

There’s also the idea of crowd sourcing for other uses that are not possible with walled off on-premises solutions. For example, Aruba Central gives customers the ability to see what IoT and compute endpoint clients are connecting to their networks, where we pull from a centralized database to ensure that a camera is really a camera based on feedback from our overall base.

These are just some of the most frequently mentioned reasons I’m hearing for a shift to cloud-based management systems. While I don’t expect that everyone can move to the cloud, I do expect that more will. If you’re ready to find out more about Aruba Central cloud and still have questions, let us know.