Aruba Central NetConductor
Streamline operations and enhance protection
Related products
Is network complexity putting the brakes on your digital acceleration?
Hybrid work, new customer and user experiences, and the need for improved IT efficiencies make it critical for the network to provide the flexibility and security needed to keep up with constantly changing business requirements. Yet advancing key business initiatives while managing a growing volume of network sites and topologies can quickly become overwhelming.
Manual approaches don’t scale
Using spreadsheets and CLI for network configuration and management becomes impractical as the network expands and diversifies.
Lock-in makes change disruptive
New protocols and topologies like VXLAN and cloud can provide benefits, but proprietary implementations can limit adoption, forcing rip and replace and vendor lock-in.
Zero Trust and SASE require built-in security
Manually applying and enforcing network access control (NAC) policies across a distributed, global network is labor-intensive and can leave security gaps.
Central NetConductor: Cloud-native network automation and orchestration
Automatically configure LAN, WLAN, and WAN infrastructure to deliver optimal network performance while defining and enforcing granular security policies that are the foundation of Zero Trust and SASE architectures. With Central NetConductor, you can automate enterprise network deployment, ongoing network configuration, and security operations.
With Central NetConductor, client traffic routing and security policies are decoupled from the underlying physical network, eliminating the need for VLAN and routing table spreadsheets, or manual configuration of ACLs. A fabric wizard based on UI-driven workflows automates network design and policy creation and automatically pushes device configurations to switches and gateways.
Central NetConductor network security tools provide both network and security teams with options for cloud-native and on-premises network access control to ensure optimal connectivity and Zero Trust Security.
First, AI-powered user and device discovery means that all users and devices on the network are continuously seen and profiled. Then authenticated users and devices are assigned a role that contains both connectivity requirements and access policies. Central NetConductor policy manager translates assigned roles into routing and access policies, which are then interpreted by Aruba CX switches and gateways.
Discover dynamic segmentation
Benefit from the network configuration, network automation, and network security tools delivered by Aruba Central without a rip-and-replace of current network infrastructure. Central NetConductor uses widely adopted protocols, such as EVPN/VXLAN, to produce an intelligent network overlay suitable for rapid enterprise network deployment and massive scalability.
Central NetConductor components
Policy manager
Defines user and device groups and creates the associated traffic routing and access enforcement rules for the physical network.
Group policy identifier (GPID)
Carries configuration and client policy information in traffic for in-line policy enforcement, which reduces configuration and security overhead and increases mobility and scalability.
Fabric wizard
Simplifies the creation of the overlays using an intuitive, graphical user interface, greatly easing the way virtual components are defined and network configuration instructions are generated and pushed to switches and gateways.
Network Insights
Utilizes artificial intelligence to automatically detect network performance and reliability issues while identifying opportunities for optimization based on local and peer-based best practices.
Client Insights
Uses machine learning to eliminate network blind spots from rogue IoT deployments by finding, fingerprinting, and automatically assigning devices the appropriate access role using AI-based behavioral analytics.
Flexible Network Access Control
Ensure entities are properly identified and assigned a role that defines their access privileges using Cloud Auth cloud-native NAC, ClearPass, or third-party solutions.
Central NetConductor in Action
Greater efficiency
Universities are the ultimate service providers, connecting different departments, buildings, and users—all with different needs. Central NetConductor provides a unified framework for network management and security across diverse networks, delivering automation, security, and agility as their customers’ needs change.
Hybrid work
A large healthcare network’s geographically dispersed staff must access cloud and IoT-sourced patient data. With Central NetConductor, IT knows what users and devices are on the network and can quickly assign and continuously update policies for both—so an infusion pump in a patient’s hospital room can be securely accessed from across the country but protected from potentially malicious traffic.
New business models
A manufacturing plant has hundreds of IoT devices, vendors, and contractors on the network to manage. Using manual, inflexible traffic segmentation schemes meant network changes took days to complete. With Central NetConductor, onboarding new users and devices takes just minutes, significantly enhancing agility and unlocking new opportunities.
