Enthusiastic adoption of new cloud and security solutions has reinforced the Australia-New Zealand region’s reputation as an “innovation testing zone”, the co-founder of Aruba Networks has confirmed in the wake of the company's sellout maiden local user conference.
Citing the increasingly global nature of security vendors’ engagement with customers, Aruba co-founder and chief technology officer Keerti Melkote told CSO Australia that the sellout crowd for the Atmosphere user conference – which had to be relocated after it hit its original registration cap a month before the event – reflected growing formal integration of mobility strategies with companies' overall technology visions.
“The pace of movement used to be slower in the past but it seems that these days, whatever we're doing, we're doing on a global basis,” he said. “All the things that we are seeing in the US, are very relevant and very applicable here as well – and in some cases we're the leading market in the world. ANZ is a very important innovation testing zone” as well as being a source of R&D acquisitions.
Local customers like Westfield had set the pace by deploying world-leading WiFi environments such as the 21-mall free WiFi rollout announced ealier this year. Behind the scenes, Aruba’s technology manages those mobile environments to ensure security policies are applied to manage usage and authentication.
That authentication was becoming increasingly important in ensuring that mobile users not only had a seamless access experience, but that security flowed through mobile environments in the same way as it currently spans network enviornments. This would, for example, allow government agencies to enforce different access control methods on different classifications of data or would allow private enterprises to separate transactional and productivity systems.
“With all these mobile devices coming into the network via Wi-Fi you're introducing a threat you have to understand and protect again,” Melkote said. “The key thing is that you have co-ordination amongst the different security solutions, and a single place to go to monitor the threat landscape.”
Atmosphere 2015 saw the company’s inaugural Channel Partner Awards and the announcement of new customers including Dick Smith Electronics, Fed Square, and the University of Tasmania recently joined a growing roster of local companies using Aruba's wireless management technology.
This technology is being integrated with HP's range of enterprise monitoring and management tools after that enterprise giant bought Aruba in March this year. In May, ANZ tech-industry stalwart Steve Wood was recruited as senior vice president for the company’s APAC operations.
Earlier this year, an Aruba survey of workers’ mobile habits found a high degree of willingness to share mobile devices, with nearly one-fifth of the 11,500 surveyed workers saying they didn't use passwords on their devices and 87 percent saying they assumed their IT organisations would keep them protected while working online.
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