HPE Aruba taps behavioral analytics to find network threats

In the zero trust realm, Aruba extended Networking Central’s capabilities to set security policies across the vendor’s edge LAN environments. Until now, such policy setting was relegated to Aruba’s security service edge (SSE) offering

“The idea is that the same security policies, the same enforcement and access control found in the cloud, will now be available on the campus, whether it’s in a data center or any other part of the campus network,” Lunetta said. “Customers don’t have to hairpin network traffic to the cloud to take advantage of the policy and enforcement that are provided by zero trust,” Lunetta said.

Ultimately, the idea is to create what’s known as universal ZTNA, which offers a single policy for network user, device and workload access and control, Lunetta said. “We aren’t there yet, but this is a major step forward on that vision,” Lunetta said.

The current announcements build on Aruba’s recent enterprise security announcements.

In May, the vendor added network security controls to help IT teams protect AI assets such as large language models from unmanaged device access. HPE said it will build new AI-powered security observability and monitoring features into its core HPE Aruba Networking Central management platform to help customers protect both AI-based and traditional resources from IoT security risks.

The goal is to enhance visibility and identification of devices connected to the network and provide continuous monitoring for unusual or rogue behavior, the vendor stated. In addition, HPE is adding firewall-as-a-service (FWaaS) support to its SSE package.