Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (00:03):
In an era where network breaches make headlines daily and AI transformation sweeps across industries, HPE Aruba Networking is positioning itself at the intersection of these critical technology trends. David Hughes, HPE, Aruba Networking's, SVP and Chief Product Officer joins us to unpack what that means for today's enterprises and service providers. David, thank you for being with us today. Hey, Clarence. Great to be here. So we're here at the HPE booth, and the one thing that I'm seeing pretty much everywhere is signs that say security first, AI powered networking. Tell us what that means.

David Hughes, HPE (00:41):
So security first, ai Power networking is all about our strategy. It's what kind of networking company we are. The security first piece is all about making sure that security is built into the network rather than bolted on. If you rewind two or three decades to when the internet was invented, anyone connected anywhere could access the computer of anybody else anywhere on that internet, which sounds kind of crazy today. But obviously to commercialize the internet, they developed a firewall and the firewall was originally designed to keep the bad guys out of your corporate network. But as time went by, people realized that there's insider threat. So things can be bad. People inside things can get hacked, and so you need to segment that network into smaller pieces, and that meant a proliferation of firewalls inside the enterprise. And today we've got to a point where we're really at peak firewall.

(01:35):
There's so many firewalls deployed. Each of them are configured with hundreds or thousands or tens of thousands of rules. So cumulatively on enterprise is millions of lines of policy that have to be just right in order to secure their networks. What security First networking is all about is changing that equation, but baking the security into the network. So the network defends itself and you define policy once maybe just a few hundred rules for an entire enterprise. And then it's enforced in every element, our access points, our switches, our gateways, and in the cloud. So that's the security first piece. The AI powered piece is all about turning the IT admin into a super admin, any IT team today has a workload that continues to go up. All those cybersecurity threats, all those great ideas the boss has mean their workload goes up and up, but the team is the same size or maybe even shrinking.

(02:34):
And so what they want us to do is leverage AI to make their jobs easier. And how do we do that? Well, every day we are collecting 24 by seven telemetry from all our switches and aps and gateways that are out there, more than 4 million going on, 5 million devices representing 2 billion endpoints. So we collect all that information, we bring it into our cloud, we anonymize it, and then we use AI models to develop insights that help each of our customers, that gives them tailored advice about what to do and if they want to, we can automate the implementation of those rules. And that really makes the IT admin's job easier. It takes away the risk of mistakes and lets that IT admin focus on the big picture. That's what security First AI power networking is all about.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (03:26):
So why is a security first approach to networking so important?

David Hughes, HPE (03:30):
Well, I think it's important for a couple of reasons. First, I think everyone recognizes that the cybersecurity environment gets tougher every day. There's new threats emerging all the time. The other thing is that many of the threats don't just originate with people or users, but with things. So there are approaches for securing kind of communications between users and the apps in the cloud that work quite well from a cloud point of view. But in the modern enterprise, there are a lot of iot devices like point of sale terminals, temperature control systems on the factory floor, a lot of automation. That all needs to be secured too. And to secure those things, you really need to implement the policy and identification of those devices in the network itself. And so those things are driving the need to bring security and networking together. And the bigger networking footprint that you have, the better security you're able to deliver.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (04:29):
So why is it important to have AI powered networking?

David Hughes, HPE (04:32):
AI powered networking is really important in terms of making it more efficient because the job's getting more complicated every day. You kind of need a balancing factor or force multiplier that turns things back in favor of it. It really helps the business move forward with its initiatives faster instead of getting held up or slowed down by the complexities of it. What

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:00):
Are some of the security first AI powered networking innovations you're showcasing here at MWC?

David Hughes, HPE (05:06):
Well, there's a lot to show right behind me on this screen, we are talking about our SSE solution. So where we're bringing together cloud enforced SSE policy with our SD-WAN technology to create a unified SSE solution. That would be one example. We're also demonstrating some of those AI insights that we get with Aruba Central to help people deploy and optimize their wifi networks. There's just a couple of examples.

Clarence Reynolds, TelecomTV (05:34):
Well, David, thank you so much for your insights today.

David Hughes, HPE (05:36):
Right. Thanks so much, Clarence.