Aruba

The secret to success

Jacob Chacko, Regional Director - Middle East, Saudi & South Africa at Aruba, a Hewlett Packard Enterprise company, explains the top benefits of having a cloud-managed network.

What are the top cloud computing trends to watch out for this year? Let’s look at why cloud computing is important to businesses in the Middle East. Cloud services offer virtually unlimited compute and storage capacity, making it ideal for utilising advanced technologies such as AI/ML analytics solutions. A cloud subscription-based model makes it easy to take advantage of new technologies that may have been resource or cost-prohibitive.

An immediate benefit is the cost and time savings achieved by eliminating the need for hardware and the resources needed to host traditional on-premises services. And because there’s virtually no ramp-up time, cloud-based solutions provide significant time-to-market and time-to-value that help businesses achieve a competitive advantage.

It is estimated that over ninety-two percent of businesses use at least one cloud-based application. And the majority of enterprises expect at least half of their management infrastructure to be cloud-based. Cloud-managed networking, often provided “as-a-service,” is rapidly growing in popularity.

Throughout 2021, we expect to see cloud-based collaboration tools leading the way. The new normal is the hybrid workplace now, allowing employees to move seamlessly back and forth from the home and the office. There has been a surge in the use of collaboration or productivity tools. In 2021, people will likely keep working hybrid, and collaboration tools will be critical to productivity. Accessing these applications from anywhere and have the same experiences helps productivity and keeps the business moving. We also expect AI to be used more widely in the cloud computing environment. The most prominent addition to the list of top benefits of AI in cloud computing is the ability to reshape your IT infrastructure. As a result, we see a high demand for AI-optimised application infrastructure now.

What are the main advantages of cloud-managed networking? Cloud-managed networking is commonly used when referring to the ability to manage Wi-Fi, wired and SD-WAN network infrastructure as a cloud-based service. This service is typically hosted in the cloud by a third party as a subscription-based purchase model.

The number one reason why you need cloud-managed networking is simplicity – your network can be up in minutes and easy to manage. With cloud-managed networking, administrators can see their entire network, regardless of location, gather real-time data for planning and troubleshooting purposes, and make configuration changes from a single pane of glass. This means no management hardware or travel is needed.

Another main advantage of cloud-managed networking is that the vendor manages the product and product update process. New features and functionality are continuously developed and automatically delivered, allowing IT to introduce new services instead of planning for downtime.

Why is cloud-enabled edge computing important for enterprises? With over 55 billion IoT devices expected to generate more than 50% of the world’s data within the next two years, businesses seek to convert their data into new revenue streams and operational efficiencies. To do so reliably and securely, they need a network architecture that is edgecentric and cloud-native and designed to automate, unify and protect the edge.

Unified infrastructure is an important attribute of the Aruba Edge Service Platform architecture. Unifying the operations of wired, wireless, and SD-WAN infrastructure under one cloud-native command center, Aruba Central empowers administrators to automate the time-consuming manual process of moving information from screen to screen, tool to tool or trying to correlate information across multiple views. By leveraging a unified data lake, Aruba ESP correlates and displays in Aruba Central multiple dimensions of information in context, unlocks powerful capabilities around automated root cause analysis, and provides more robust analytics.