You heard the news. Aruba Netwoks today announced the execution of a definitive agreement to purchase privately-held Avenda Systems. Yeah, I know what you are thinking… Aruba, AirWave, Azalea, Amigopod, Avenda. That’s a lot of A’s, wow!
Two teams are coming together to tackle advanced engineering challenges in BYOD. There are several engineering challenges that Avenda product line is trying to address.
To hear more about BYOD and what it means for your network, join us at Airheads Social for a live video event on the topic. Video will be streamed on Airheads Social homepage on February 21st 10am PST. You can register at: http://www.arubanetworks.com/register/BYOD/index.html
First – enabling secure network access to different types of devices (Mac, Linux, iOS, Android, Windows, etc.), different categories of guest and employee users and purpose built devices (printers, gaming consoles). Device based authentication and health check, in addition to user authentication, become not important but crucial.
Second – supporting different types of technologies at the access layer (wired, wireless, VPN etc.) across multiple vendors (Aruba, Cisco, Juniper, etc.). Things get out of hand pretty fast operationally if you cannot enforce authentication and access control across all points of entry to the network.
Third – trying to take control of support costs as more devices connect to the network. Any security or network engineer would be thrilled to have a way to auto-provision end user devices for 802.1x authentication!
Last but not least – figuring out what just went wrong in the network. Detailed historical forensics will sure help troubleshoot authentication failures and policy enforcement issues.
Got questions or comments? Post them into the forums and let’s talk more about Avenda.
Cheers,
Ozer