Wi-Fi is an essential service for any business, and with Aruba Instant On, businesses can leverage powerful, enterprise-grade Wi-Fi without the hassles or complexity of many other Wi-Fi products.
At Aruba, we are excited to release Instant On 2.0. As always, we carefully collected feedback from our customers and partners to enhance Instant On’s capabilities to meet the needs of small and midsize businesses. We appreciate our customers and partners engaging and giving us feedback on community.arubainstanton.com.
As more organizations around the world deploy Instant On, we have seen many different use cases and deployments. Many of Instant On 2.0 enhancements have been made to better serve these uses.
Let’s look at seven new capabilities:
1. Improve the user experience with enhanced shared services.
A great user experience often depends on shared services like Bonjour or Chromecast. For example, AirPrint and DLNA Print make it possible to print from mobile devices. iTunes is essential to keep the music flowing. AirPlay, Chromecast and DLNA media keep the video entertainment streaming. Remote management also depends on shared services. Now, it’s easy to access these services across the wired and wireless networks at your location.
The design of Instant On emphasizes simplicity and ease of use. Configuration is extremely minimal, while being super-secure. Within the same Instant On network, shared services are discovered automatically, with no configuration needed. To take advantage of the shared services across multiple Instant On networks, all a customer has to do is enable or disable the services with a single click, and that’s it!
2. Greater flexibility for guest access with a choice of integrated, third-party captive portals.
Many businesses use a captive portal to establish their brand identity, ensure users are aware of usage policies and tap into data to personalize the user experience.
With Instant On, businesses can take advantage of a built-in captive portal service, and if needed, upgrade for more marketing and customer campaign-related capabilities.
Aruba has partnered with Aislelabs, Purple, Skyfii and Wavespot to provide integrated, best-of-breed captive portal capabilities.
The biggest advantage that customers get is that a lot of the functionality for the captive portal dashboard come as part of Instant On without paying extra.
Captive portal integration helps business owners with:
- Comprehensive analytics of customers in their stores, including demographics, profile, peak customer visit times, likes and preferences
- Optimizing marketing, customer reach, surveys and targeted campaigns
- Using analytics and marketing to increase revenue, store popularity and ROI
- Minimal, easy configuration to set up integration between Instant On and the external captive portal
- Partners that manage multiple customer networks can set up a single captive portal dashboard and use a single pane-of-glass to compare analytics and ROI across all their customer sites.
3. Secure remote and at-home workers with enhanced VPN services.
The world of late has been different due to the COVID-19 pandemic. People are working from home using their personal devices or their company laptops. The network is becoming more distributed, and so are the security risks. To help keep your business safe, Instant On partnered with NordVPN, a trusted online VPN provider.
The timing for the partnership couldn’t have been better as it will serve InstantOn customers really well during the COVID-19 (for remote work) times.
Instant On customers can take advantage of lower prices and attractive discounts for NordVPN service through the Instant On mobile app or web portal by clicking on the “technology partners and promotions link” to view details.
4. Greater control over client destination traffic with modifiable firewall rules.
Greater control means that Instant On is adaptable to the many ways Wi-Fi is used. Instant On has enhanced firewall rules to keep organizations even safer by preventing malicious traffic from entering the network. Customers can modify a new set of firewall rules to allow or deny access between clients and servers across multiple networks to provide greater flexibility and control.
For example, if a customer has a server in its internal network, they can add a rule in which clients from the guest or employee network can interact with this server. Or visitors at a hotel connecting to the guest wireless network may be allowed access to the printer for self-service, while keeping reservation servers off limits.
5. Assigning networks to ports on Instant On AP11D.
Instant On AP11D comes with four wired ports. The first port can be used to power on the AP using PoE and the rest can be used to connect other APs or even switches and even provide PoE out.
With 2.0, we have added the capability to assign networks to these ports. We brought in the router and gateway functionality to our APs many releases back and our customers instantly loved it! The APs also have built-in firewall rules, which prevent malicious traffic from entering the network and make it ideal to be the edge device in your small network. So, if you want your wired and wireless clients to be in the same network, then consider it done!
6. Use easily recognizable names for clients.
Businesses like cafes and hotels have both their own devices on the network as well as guest devices. To easily identify and prioritize their own clients on the network, such as point of sale system, tablets or laptops, over guest devices, Instant On now allows customers to help name their clients with easily understandable names.
7. Enhanced software updates from the cloud.
Customers can remotely configure and manage Instant On because it is cloud-managed network. If there is a problem in the network, customers are immediately alerted by an Instant On push notification to their mobile phone to help them fix the issue quickly. That brings peace of mind for the business and a better experience for staff and visitors.
When new Instant On software is released, it is automatically pushed from the cloud without requiring customers to do any manual downloads. Customers can immediately upgrade or upgrade within the week at a default time set (when there is least impact to the business, for example, at 3am on a Sunday morning). With Instant On 2.0, customers can now delay the software upgrade by an additional week, which is useful to a customer that may require more time before upgrading the entire network.
We would love to hear from you. Check out the new Instant On release 2.0 and give us your feedback at community.arubainstanton.com.
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