Avaya has announced a complete network lifecycle management solution for enterprise and mid-size businesses. The Avaya Cloud Networking Platform purportedly delivers a unified solution for deploying and managing wired and wireless networks with complete control and visibility anywhere, anytime.
According to industry analysts, cloud managed models are growing rapidly, with cloud-managed Wi-Fi growing at twice the rate of Wi-Fi deployments. In addition, businesses are increasingly seeking a unified solution that can manage both wireless and wired networks.
Avaya Cloud Networking provides IT professionals with centralized management, visibility, and control over their network without the complexity of controller appliances or overlay management software. Hardware such as switches and access points installed on a customer premises are configured and managed in the cloud. IT managers can easily add, change, or modify network services from an easy to use dashboard to meet rapidly evolving business needs.
Features of the Avaya Cloud Networking Platform include:
- Zero-touch activation of new access points and switches along with automated software updates and simplified license management relieves IT of some of their biggest operational burdens. A fully-integrated Guest Portal and BYOD on-boarding capability further improves operations.
- Robust security ensures that customers concerns are adequately addressed about data privacy, regulatory needs and alignment with business policies. The multi-tenant platform provides data isolation among different cloud tenants. All communications are fully encrypted, with user traffic remaining on the firewall protected LAN and cloud connectivity only required for out of band management functionality.
- Service availability is guaranteed with data center redundancy and data replication. Wireless APs act autonomously even when the cloud connection is lost. Traffic and security is processed directly at the network edge in each AP.
- Massive scalability to support thousands of network devices ensures current and future needs can be accommodated. Multi-tenant support and the flexibility of a SaaS solution allows for easy scaling to support subscription based pay as you grow model.
Avaya channel partners can offer the Avaya Cloud Networking Platform to customers, expanding their portfolio with cloud-managed services. Pricing for the cloud networking management service is on a subscription basis; hardware is priced separately.
The Avaya Cloud Networking Platform will be generally available globally with support for wireless in November 2016 and support for wired networks coming in a follow-on release.