Aruba, a wireless networking subsidiary of Hewlett Packard, announced that Enloe Medical Center, a comprehensive healthcare facility based in Chico, California, is expanding its end-to-end Aruba network by adding Aruba EdgeConnect SD-WAN gateways and Aruba Location Services.

Enloe’s expansion with Aruba is designed to double its branch networking capacity to each of its nearly 30 locations, provide reliable high-performance connectivity, and permit the management of nearly 30,000 connected devices, the company says. The deployment also aims enable Enloe to rapidly track thousands of pieces of vital healthcare equipment and ultimately reduce IT hours via advanced network automation.

“Aruba ensures we can resiliently connect all of our healthcare providers, their devices, and our critical applications, like our extensive Epic electronic medical record (EMR) implementation, all of the time – guaranteeing access to whatever our staff needs, whenever they need it, so they can concentrate on treating their patients,” says Christopher Webb, director of technology, Enloe. “Our new EdgeConnect SD-WAN and location services solutions supply us the reliable and secure technologies we need to continue our long-standing commitment to patient-centric excellence.”

Additionally, the capability to reduce IT overhead enterprise-wide enables re-investing in further healthcare innovation, the company says.

“We provision and deploy 150 to 300 new devices monthly,” says Webb. “Using Aruba’s automation features, we’re able to re-direct IT time to higher-value, critical initiatives like supporting the development of a new 200,000 sq. ft. cancer center.”

For its SD-WAN, Enloe has added EdgeConnect to its wireless solution, comprised of Aruba’s access points (APs) and mobility controllers. On the wired side, the institution has implemented Aruba’s CX Series switches for the data center core along with access and aggregation switches.

Asset tracking is accomplished by combining the location awareness resident in Enloe’s Aruba APs with Aruba Location Services and Aruba Tags.

“Aruba’s business-friendly location services solution empowers our non-technical supply department to own and manage the process for tagging and tracking assets,” Webb says. “What’s more, Aruba’s flexible and advanced technology enabled us to simply leverage our existing Wi-Fi infrastructure for asset tracking, rather than requiring a forklift upgrade.”

Enloe is also streamlining wired, wireless, and SD-WAN policy administration using Aruba’s integrated zero trust security capabilities. This includes rolling out Aruba Dynamic Segmentation along with Aruba ClearPass for network security policy management, as well as the ability to support consistent and automated policy-based network access control (NAC) across Enloe’s enterprises to support healthcare workers, administrative staff, and guests.

Moving forward, Enloe plans to evolve its network by adopting automated IT operations features using Aruba Central for cloud-based artificial intelligence IT operations (AIOps) that provides AI-powered insights, workflow automation, and edge-to-cloud security while unifying wired, wireless, and SD-WAN management, the company says.

“Having worked with multiple networking companies, we value our ongoing partnership with Aruba as the best we’ve experienced by far,” says Webb. “Aruba’s solutions perform as advertised, they’re issue-free, and they’re extremely agile. In short, they just work.”