Gartner Puts Aruba Networks in Leader's Quadrant for Second Straight Year

Aruba Networks announced on Monday that it was in the Leader’s Quadrant in Gartner, Inc.’s latest “Magic Quadrant for Wired and Wireless LAN Infrastructure” report for the second consecutive year. Completeness of vision and ability to execute are the two criteria Gartner uses to rate vendors.

Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Aruba Networks develops several products and solutions relating to mobile technology. These solutions support BYOD, classified networking, remote networking and serve business, education, government, retail, hospitality and healthcare.

Aruba’s Mobile Virtual Enterprise (MOVE) architecture is the company’s flagship solution. It allows IT departments to better manage BYOD policies and unites an enterprise’s disparate networks into one manageable structure.

Access management is handled through the Clear Pass policy manager, which gives IT departments better control over who and what has access to the enterprise network.

BYOD policies address the rights of employees, visitors and vendors to access network resources. A personal BYOD app lets users register devices with the network and give access to guests. IT departments can manage access to devices remotely. If a user’s smartphone was lost or stolen, it’s simple to revoke access to that device.

The process of adding a device to the network is pretty simple. The network examines the device to see what operating system and version it uses and sends the proper installation package to it for setup.

Access control also includes configuring which applications have access to the network and to what degree they have access.

ClearPass also works to ensure that all devices are compliant. This would prevent access to smartphones that have been jailbroken or that are not up-to-date on security and OS patches. 

With the MOVE architecture, Aruba has developed a solution that addresses the concerns that IT departments have with mobile device access.

It also eliminates the repetitive tasks that result from having network ‘silos.’ Instead of doing the same management tasks for five different networks five times, all tasks can be performed once.

With the flexibility that MOVE has demonstrated so far, it should continue to be a powerful solution for at least the next couple of years. It’s also likely that Aruba will continue to receive recognition as it has with Gartner.