Education and Technology

I recently had the pleasure of attending the 2022 Colorado Association of Leaders in Education Technology (CALET) “Winter Leadership Conference” as a sponsor (on behalf of Aruba Networks and Zunesis.) This annual event brings together Information Technology leaders from primary education institutions all over the state of Colorado. They discuss new innovations, challenges, best practices, and ideas for the future.

Technology has helped aid education for decades. Its significance has increased substantially over the last few years, especially so after the onset of the COVID-19 Pandemic. While manning the Aruba/Zunesis booth, I had great conversations with IT Directors, Network Admins, CTO’s and others, about technological challenges they face in today’s K-12 education landscape. I shared with attendees about the many ways that we are trying to help K-12 education customers navigate these challenge. I wanted to share with the rest of you some ways that we can help. Particularly with Aruba Networks.

 

High-Performance Wireless Networks for  K-12 Student Success

1. Aruba’s Wi-Fi 6 (802.11.ax) infrastructure is designed to support schools of any size with always-on secure connectivity. Seamless roaming allows network access on the move. While high-density capabilities support large classrooms, auditoriums, and outdoor facilities. Learning management and unified communications systems can be prioritized to deliver latency-sensitive data, voice, and video without delay, loss, or jitter.
2. Unified infrastructure: Aruba offers a unified infrastructure from edge to core with wired and wireless networks that work together to deliver a consistent and secure network experience. Aruba designs its own semiconductors so its switches can provide blazing fast and highly granular visibility into the performance of the switching fabric. SmartRate power-over-Ethernet (PoE) allows Wi-Fi 6 access points to operate at >1Gbps over existing cabling, eliminating the need to rip and replace cable plants to obtain multi-gigabit wireless performance.
3. The Network Analytics Engine (NAE), included with AOS-CX, provides a built-in framework for monitoring and troubleshooting networks. NAE detects problems in real-time and analyzes trends using the time-series database so IT can predict future performance and security issues.
4. With ClearPass Policy Manager, devices are profiled, authenticated, authorized, and tightly managed network access using granular, policy-based access controls once they are identified on the network. Users and devices have restricted access to only those network, IT, and application resources for which they have been approved. ClearPass also ensures that users and devices are compliant with regulations governing student privacy and personally identifiable information
5. Aruba Wi-Fi 6 access points include radios for wayfinding, geofencing, location tracking, sensor monitoring, door locking, and actuator control. These capabilities transform Aruba access points into secure, multi-purpose communication systems that are both network access on-ramps and full-fledged IoT platforms.
6. AI-based Maching Learning: Aruba delivers customized recommendations through AI-based machine learning to improve network and application performance based on anonymized comparison with peer environments. If a change could increase performance by 10%, it is recommended to the Network Admin who can then authorize the settings to change. Aruba User Experience Insight provides IT a real-time view of the end-user experience and clear action steps to resolve any issues before a service ticket is opened. These powerful tools bring much-needed help to enable already overwhelmed IT staff to take necessary action and stay ahead of issues.

E-rate

I covered some key technological solutions that Aruba Networks is offering but I didn’t even get to the best part: E-rate. School districts across the country depend on E-rate funding to make infrastructure systems and telecommunication more affordable. Aruba not only has an entire catalog of E-rate eligible networking solutions but even provides an entire team of E-rate professionals to guide customers through the process and maximize their IT spend.

 

Contact Zunesis to find out how we can assist K-12 schools.

Additional Resources: 

Aruba Solutions for Primary Education  

Aruba Solutions Primary Education E-rate

 

Increased Vulnerability

 

 

Identifying what connects to the network is the first step to securing your enterprise.  Control through the automated application of wired and wireless policy enforcement ensures that only authorized and authenticated users and devices are allowed to connect to your network.  At the same time, real-time attack response and threat protection is required to secure and meet internal and external audit and compliance requirements.

 

 

 

Laptops, smartphones, tablets and Internet of Things (IoT) devices are pouring in the the workplace.  The average employee now utilizes an average of three devices.  The addition of IoT increases the vulnerabilities inside the business adding to the operational burden.

 

Wired and Wireless Devices

 

 

The use if IoT devices on wired and wireless networks is shifting IT’s focus.  Many organizations secure their wireless networks and devices. Some may have neglected the wired ports in conference rooms, behind IP phones and in printer areas.

 

 

Wired devices – like sensors, security cameras and medical devices force IT to think about securing the millions of wired ports that could be wide open to security threats.  Because these devices may lack security attributes and require access from external administrative resources, apps or service providers, wired access now poses new risks.

 

 

As IT valiantly fights the battle to maintain control, they need the right set of tools. Tools that can quickly program the underlying infrastructure and control network access for any IoT and mobile device – known and unknown.

 

 

Today’s network access security solutions must deliver profiling, policy enforcement, guest access, BYOD onboarding and more. They should offer IT-offload, enhanced threat protection and an improved user experience.

 

 

Mobility and IoT are Changing How We Think About Access Control

 

 

The boundaries of IT domains now extend beyond the four walls of business and the goal for organizations is to provide anytime, anywhere connectivity without sacrificing security.

 

 

How does IT maintain visibility and control without impacting the business and user experience?  It starts with a 3-step plan.

 

 

1. Identify – what devices are being used, how many, where they’re connecting from, and which operating systems are supported. This provides the foundation of visibility.  Continuous insight into the enterprise-wide device landscape and potential device security corruption.  Which elements come and go gives you the visibility required over time.
2. Enforce – accurate policies that provide proper user device access, regardless of user, device type or location; this provides an expected user experience. Organizations must adapt to today’s evolving devices and their use, whether the device is a smartphone or surveillance camera.
3. Protect – resources via dynamic policy controls and real-time threat remediation that extends to third-party systems. This is the last piece of the puzzle.  Being prepared for unusual network behavior at 3 AM requires a unified approach that can block traffic and change the status of a device’s connection.

 

 

 

Organizations must plan for existing and unforeseen challenges.  With their existing operational burden, it’s not realistic to rely on IT and help desk staff to manually intervene whenever a user decides to work remotely or buy a new smartphone.  Network access control is no longer just for performing assessments on known devices before access.

 

 

 

Aruba ClearPass

 

 

The stakes are high. It’s surprising that more companies have not embraced secure NAC to prevent malicious insiders from causing damage to the enterprise.  The uses cases are many-control devices connectivity, simplify BYOD, secure guest access leads to the same answer, Aruba ClearPass.

 

 

 

 

 

Over 7,000 customers in 100 countries have secured their network and their business with Aruba ClearPass.  They have achieved better visibility, control and response.  Shouldn’t you? Contact Zunesis to find out how you can secure your network.

 

 

 

 

Ensuring that all wireless clients get the service levels they need is a major challenge, especially when smartphones, tablets and other devices control their own connectivity and roaming decisions on the network.

 

ClientMatch® is a RF management technology developed by Aruba Networks that puts the connectivity and roaming control back into the wireless solution. The idea behind this is that the wireless solution will have a much better idea of which access point is the most appropriate client, based on the information the Access Points are constantly collecting. This allows the controller (or Instant Controller) to make these decisions about what to do with a client in real time, which drastically increases performance of a wireless network.

 

Client Steering

 

The old adage of “one bad apple spoils the bunch” is especially true in wireless networking, particularly now with the greater than gigabit speeds of 802.11AC. Once attached to an AP, clients tend to stay attached even when the user begins to walk away from the AP and the device signal weakens. When these devices do not roam to a new access point, it drags down the throughput of everyone else on the access point they are “stuck” to.

 

We call these devices “sticky clients,” and a few of them can even bring modern wireless networks to their knees if they do not know how to handle these clients. The process of moving clients to more appropriate AP’s within a network is called Client Steering.

 

Band Steering

 

In addition to addressing the problem of sticky clients, ClientMatch® also helps devices connect to the best available radio. Let’s say a dual-band client attempts to connect to a 2.4GHz radio on an access point with a 20MHz channel, ClientMatch® will steer that client to an avaiable 40MHz channel on a 5GHz radio – provided there is one in the client’s range with good signal strength. This allows the wireless system to take full advantage of the client’s capabilities to essentially double its throughput by forcing it to connect to the correct radio. This feature within ClientMatch® is  called Band Steering.

 

Dynamic Load Balancing

 

Whether we are talking about Band Steering or Client Steering, Aruba always takes the Access Point Load into account when making these calculations. Dynamic Load Balancing addresses client density problems by dynamically distributing clients across available AP’s and Channels, ensuring that individual APs aren’t overloaded and client performance is continually maximized. This is a very important feature in client dense environments like auditoriums.

 

An analogy I like to use to explain all of this is the highway analogy. A true BYOD network will have a diverse set of devices that all need access, similar to a highway and its diverse set of cars and drivers. One or two slow drivers can cause serious delays in your morning commute, as all of the traffic behind them begins to pile up. However, simply steering these “slow drivers” to the correct lane will increase the total speed of the highway (user experience) immensely.

 

ClientMatch® is included in both Instant and Controller deployments. It is a base, unlicensed feature of the Aruba Operating System. It is available as part of AOS 6.3 and higher. For more information download this tech brief.