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Higher education institutions are under constant pressure to support demands from administrators, faculty, staff, and students.
Digital curricula, classroom collaboration, and context-aware services are moving to the cloud.
Campuses are essentially small cities, and new Internet of Things (IoT) devices are flooding into labs, buildings, and facilities, forcing IT to find ways to secure IoT network communications.
Students are using more devices in class, for remote learning, and in residence halls, and IT is being asked to support personalized learning for everyone.
Calls for improved campus safety are driving requests for gunshot detectors, location-enabled panic buttons, wireless video surveillance cameras, and vaping sensors.
Aruba’s Edge Services Platform provides always-on, secure connectivity with an architecture that is extensible across a broad range of IT, IoT, and operational technology (OT) applications.
Built on a Zero Trust Security framework, the platform unifies wired, wireless, and WAN operations and security wherever users learn, work or roam.
To improve operational efficiency, the Edge Services Platform (ESP) uses AI-driven insights and automation to predict issues and optimize the network before users are impacted. The results empower faculty, staff, and students to create, innovate, and collaborate in ways never before possible, with unparalleled privacy and security. Below are 5 ways Aruba ESP can transform our institution into a smart, digital campus:
1. Unified, Always-On, and Automated Connectivity
Campuses run non-stop, and so must the networks that support them. Students need network access at all hours. Classes and research projects run day and night, and public safety systems must be ever vigilant. For all these applications, network performance must be consistently reliable.
2. End-to-End Network Protection
While higher education institutions have been investing in cybersecurity, unsettling breach statistics and costly ransomware attacks show more needs to be done to protect people and information.
Traditional security solutions create a secure perimeter and detect attacks and malware based on their patterns or signatures. This model is unsuitable for colleges and universities where there is no perimeter: students, staff, and faculty move on and off-campus, and need network access everywhere.
Aruba’s Zero Trust Security framework dynamically segments network traffic. With policy management, analytics, and automation, the risks of security breaches are minimized while detection and response are enhanced.
3. Intuitive AI-Powered Management Tools So You Can Act Quickly
Aruba ESP includes assurance and orchestration features to maximize up-time, optimize user experiences, and reduce the time to troubleshoot issues to root cause.
Automated network assurance delivers AIOps insights from a single pane of glass, while edge-to-cloud experience monitoring generates automated AI-based alerts that proactively pinpoint critical application and network issues.
4. Improved Experiences and Student Safety at the Forefront
Colleges and universities are places of learning and community. The safety of faculty, students, and staff used to be taken for granted, but no longer. Today’s natural disasters, civil unrest, and active shooters impact campus safety and are a major concern for first responders.
Network infrastructure can help by quantifying the nature of the threat, identifying safe and unsafe areas, and automatically guiding people to safety.
While networks can’t prevent incidents from occurring, they can lessen the impact of incidents by keeping faculty, students, staff, visitors, and first responders safer.
5. A Partner For Your Smart Digital Campus Journey
The most dynamic and transformative experiences happen at the edge. Aruba’s mission is to harness and secure data at the edge, and, in partnership with our customers, to enable the most meaningful education digitalization initiatives. Start the journey with VLCM’s Aruba Engineers by visiting www.vlcm.com/higher-education-networking.
