Aruba Networks Applications
Business Continuity

Business continuity planning is essential in today's information-driven enterprise because business interruptions, whether due to inclement weather or pandemic health scares, are not acceptable. It also increases employee productivity by making information uniformly available everywhere.

Productivity is often reduced the moment a user steps outside of their office because information becomes more difficult to access. Deploying business continuity solutions from Aruba allows a consistent level of productivity outside of the office by enabling uniform access to enterprise tools everywhere.

Despite its benefits, business continuity can be expensive and complex to deploy. They are either consumer-grade products that cannot meet the reliability and security requirements of an enterprise or are miniature versions of branch office solutions and require expert installation and management. Aruba's Remote AP solution bridges the gap with an innovative design that takes the thin access point architecture and applies it to remote access.

The Aruba Networks Solution for Business Continuity

Aruba enables business continuity at a TCO that was not previously possible. By designing the Remote AP to be user-installable and moving the burden of configuration and management completely to the data center, Aruba has lowered the operational expenses as well as capital expenses of business continuity solutions. At the remote site, the Remote AP can operate in two modes - centralized or split MAC mode. In the centralized mode, the Remote AP provides wired and wireless 802.1X authentication and VPN connectivity, and all the communications are routed centrally at the data center. In the split-MAC mode, the Remote AP offers local policy enforcement, split tunneling to route Internet-bound traffic locally, and a "WAN-down" profile so inter-office communications continue even when the WAN link is down. Policies are enforced by a firewall at the Access Point that mirror those enforced by the corporate Aruba Mobility Controller. If multiple users connect to an access point, each user will be managed separately, consistent with policies established at the corporate office.

At the data center, the mobility controller provides firewall, VPN and full 802.11i intelligence, as well as complete configuration and management. All Aruba mobility controllers and access points can be enabled for business continuity applications simply by software key activation.

The Aruba Advantage:

• Site-To-Site Mobility: Easily move to a new site and setup a corporate hotspot
• User Installable Design: Dramatically lowers cost of deployment
• Voice over IP: Extend the office phone extension through a wired or wireless connection remotely
• Always-on Connectivity: Automatic discovery and failover between diverse data centers and local VRRP Redundancy
• Wired and Wireless Security: Policy enforcement and 802.1X authentication for each user