Palo Alto Networks wrapped up a busy week at the Aruba Atmosphere 2015 in Las Vegas, including keynote talks from Aruba Networks CEO Dominic Orr who graciously shared the stage with Chad Kinzelberg, Palo Alto Networks SVP of Business & Corporate Development. Together, they mapped out trends in the industry that highlight innovation in both networking and security today.
On the wireless networking side, the ascendency of the 11ac standard highlights the pressing need for more bandwidth over the air. This is true both from the perspective of capacity, but also as a matter of practicality. Today’s mobile devices are using wireless as the preferred interface, and even laptop manufacturers are making the transition too with some that don’t even have Ethernet ports built-in at all.
In years past, the challenge of getting more performance was seen as a standards issue. As discussed on stage by Dominic and Chad, it’s also about making sure that the applications are aligned to business needs.
These are the same principles that underline threat prevention, because aligning applications to business needs establishes the foundation for good security. Reducing the attack surface is a critical step toward establishing a prevention-first mindset.
We have been working together with Aruba Networks for some time now, providing an elegant integration between Aruba’s Network Controllers and the Next-Generation Firewall that maps users and devices to policies on the content that they can access, providing a very tight link between the user and the applications they use. We also announced a new dimension to this work, with integration between GlobalProtect Large Scale VPN and Aruba’s new Cloud Services Controller. This solution addresses the need for security at the branch that can be deployed with zero-touch, and automatically connects to the best GlobalProtect Gateway to enforce security policy. We’ll be sharing more details on this solution in the days to come.