Raising the bar in campus connectivity
BITS Pilani Dubai Campus sets new benchmark in secure and high-performance campus connectivity in collaboration with HPE Aruba Networking
The need for robust Wi-Fi infrastructure has increased exponentially on the campuses of educational institutions. With students, faculty, and staff increasingly using more digital tools and cloud-based services, fast and uninterrupted Wi-Fi is today critical for institutions looking to enable seamless connectivity.
BITS Pilani Dubai Campus (BITS Pilani), a world-leading institution, stands at the forefront of innovation and excellence in Technology education. Over the past year, it has collaborated with HPE Aruba Networking, a leader in high-performance networking solutions, to address their requirement for advanced and extensive Wi-Fi at their prestigious campus in Dubai Academic City. This deployment, done largely over two phases last year and a third phase completed this year, helps to enhance the dynamic and interactive campus environment, including all indoor and outdoor spaces such as auditoriums, convocation halls, and outdoor fields.
The new system puts security at the forefront with solutions that offer a complete view of network activities. These ensure robust security and empower the institution to establish and enforce stringent network access policies, safeguarding the data and privacy of its users. The solution includes AI and ML tools to provide real-time insights into network performance and help manage troubleshooting issues in no time. Since the completion of the campus and hostel deployment last year, both areas have enjoyed enhanced connectivity, including the auditoriums, convocation halls, and outdoor fields.
HPE Aruba Networking wanted to provide optimal Wi-Fi performance in line with current requirements and capable of handling future needs for the next several years. The entire deployment includes high-speed and high-capacity Wi-Fi infrastructure, consisting of high-performance Wi-Fi 6E Access Points, Routers, and Switches
According to Zeeshan Hadi, Country Manager for UAE & Africa at HPE Aruba Networking, the solutions team has focused on significantly transforming the overall experience for the customer.
“As the institution was relying heavily on a lot of online collaboration and thought sharing specifically on online platforms, they wanted to enable an exceptional experience for their students and their staff. We provided the customer with a state-of-the-art solution built using Wi-Fi 6E access points, which are among the fastest in our portfolio”, says Zeeshan.
He adds, “We have so far focused on Wi-Fi and the switches related to the Wi-Fi network, concentrating on critical infrastructure and thereby making it easy for our customer to set clear priorities in their budget spending. With this, we have fully upgraded BITS Pilani’s Wi-Fi backend infrastructure and left out whatever is not very critical. They are planning to upgrade the remaining infrastructure.”
HPE Aruba Networking offered a completely new perspective to the customer for the investment that they’re going to make for the coming 5 to 7 years.
Professor Souri Banerjee, Director at BITS Pilani, Dubai Campus (BPDC), says, “The implementation of the latest advanced Wi-Fi from HPE Aruba Networking has significantly enhanced and transformed the way our students and faculty members connect and collaborate across the campus. The seamless, high-speed connectivity enables everything from digital lessons to real-time collaboration on projects.”
AI-based network management
AI-based platforms have become crucial for network administration with their capability to help orchestrate network access and provide monitoring, and real-time visibility into any potential anomalies. This eases the work for teams managing complex networks and ensures higher efficiency and security. To simplify and optimise the network management and streamline operations, BITS Pilani’s IT team uses HPE Aruba Networking Central. The cloud-based networking solution empowers the team with AI-powered insights, intuitive visualizations, workflow automation, and edge-to-cloud security to manage campus, branch, remote, data center, and IoT networks from one dashboard. HPE Aruba Networking Central is a key accelerator to automate and orchestrate a lot of workflows for BITS Pilani.
With over 600 students that live in the hostel on the campus, they needed a superior connectivity experience on the move and from anywhere between their classrooms to their hostel rooms. The high speed W-Fi network from HPE Aruba Networking helps meet the connectivity expectations from the students who use a plethora of devices from laptops to phones to gaming consoles and other digital accessories for seamless connectivity.
“We have received positive feedback on the Wi-Fi experience from the main users in the campus, our students. Students can now roam from the academic block back into their hostel and see no changes in connectivity– whether they receive a video or voice call, checking their schedules, looking up information for the next class or rewatching a recorded seminar,” says Professor Banerjee.
The intuitive AI platform has also helped in significantly reducing the time required to troubleshoot any issues. IT teams have full visibility of any device connected to their network and are able to pinpoint issues in real-time, with greater accuracy, and can reduce the time required for troubleshooting by up to 80%.
“If ever, there are any challenges or problems that the students are experiencing, the IT team would know immediately what the problems are, and they would also know the recommended fixes to those issues,” adds Zeeshan.
Zeeshan emphasizes that the idea was to position it as something very simple to operate, simple to manage, and easy to roll out new sites and configurations without having any problems of human errors.
“It’s a completely new way of doing networking, with a heavy reliance on AI generated insights. This allows BITS Pilani to address potential issues before it can spread across the campus.”
Enhancing Security
The focus was not just on enhanced connectivity but also on providing secure access. With the need to secure everything from student data to exams and research content, there was a need for advanced Wi-Fi with the latest security protocols that could provide stronger encryption and authentication methods and help protect against cyber threats and unauthorized access.
This is an ever-growing challenge for most higher educational environments as students bring all kinds of gadgets and devices to the campus, which they then try to connect to the network.
“This was a major concern and challenge for BITS Pilani, as some students would connect 5-6 devices, overwhelming the available network capacity. We were delighted to be able to offer the perfect solution with our network access control (NAC) platform ClearPass. The platform allows the IT team to safely on-board only a recommended number of devices per user which would mean that first, they have full visibility of the devices connected to their network and at the same time manage the bandwidth load,” says Zeeshan.
Based on Zero Trust Security, HPE Aruba Networking ClearPass Policy Manager (CPPM) provides robust network access control with granular role-based policies for authentication, authorization, continuous monitoring, and enforcement. It is also highly interoperable and allows customers to leverage their investment in earlier security products.
Once deployed, ClearPass helps define user policies. Every time a student or a staff member logs into the network, they are given the right set of privileges or access controls to access any resources on the network and once they connect to the network and authenticate themselves, ClearPass will continuously monitor everything that they’re doing inside the network, and if in case any anomalies are detected, preventive actions can be taken and the admin will be notified about the same.
This has greatly enhanced a lot of their workflows because earlier they were manually allowing devices or blocking devices based on their Mac addresses. However, besides being cumbersome, that is not an effective approach anymore because modern devices randomize their Mac addresses and it is therefore becoming increasingly difficult to filter devices now based on Mac addresses.
With ClearPass working in tandem with Aruba Central, once you create a user profile and assign a set of access privileges, irrespective of where he or she logs in and whichever device, only those authorized privileges would be available to that user. These access privileges can be related to any devices inclusive of IoT equipment, printers, scanners, lab devices, lab equipment, and anything that connects to the switches and the Wi-Fi. Once you have the profile link from Aruba Central, you can use that profiling to create policies in your networks.
In summary, the comprehensive Wi-Fi network deployed is a future proof high speed, high-performance, and highly secure network that provides an environment where technology drives collaboration, raises the bar in campus connectivity, and helps facilitate a superior and secure network experience for students, faculty, and staff.