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centralised management system like AIDA and many of our customers do, it gives you centralised access to all your Out-of- Band infrastructure and the connected devices behind and helps you in your daily work. “For example, Opengear release a new firmware for the hardware every quarter, plus security patches if needed. When we release new firmware, customers must deploy it to stay compliant and on top of all security requests they have. How do you do that if, as in AIDA’s case, the ships are out on the ocean? With a centralised management system and a 4G/5G cellular or satellite connection, you can do this easily. You just upload this to the Lighthouse server or to the management server once, set a time to roll out those patches, and the system does it for you. It’s not only accessing those devices, but managing and monitoring those devices, which is a huge boost to their efficiency and flexibility.” Speed, flexibility and resilience are the three key factors that customers are looking for in most vertical markets, Dirk adds. “We have customers from
Opengear now provides reliable remote access to over 64,000 network devices across AIDA’s fIeet, even if a ship’s primary network is offline. The Opengear solution has also brought costs savings for AIDA. “AIDA’s headquarters are in Rostock in Northern Germany, but their cruise ships go around the world,” explains Dirk. “If something happened to the network equipment or to a switch or firewall, before, somebody had to jump on a plane, fly to that location, stay onboard to replace the hardware and test it, and that cost alone is more than buying one of the Opengear console server devices and putting it on a ship. My take is that if you save just one trip, especially for a network manager or network administrator, the whole solution is paid off.” Out of Band advantages While this is an extreme example, it shows what Out of Band Management can do for customers of all sizes. “If a customer has a distributed network infrastructure regardless of size, their central IT team want to be able to securely access and manage the network to make it more resilient,” says Dirk. “From core data centres, edge sites like branch offices, production sites around the country, continent or globe. A Smart out-of-band solution is perfect because it gives the ability to securely access, manage and monitor all this network equipment from wherever you are. “If you’re using our Lighthouse
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We have customers from almost every vertical market, and the general objective of our customers is how easy and fast and resilient manage
almost every vertical market, who could be managing a few sites to
my network equipment.
global deployments with thousands of devices and the general objective of our customers is the same – to find a solution that is easy, fast and resilient, to help me manage my network equipment,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if it’s a governmental organisation, a bank, insurance company, retail or transportation company. They have a distributed network that they want to remotely manage and control securely; the approach from all these organisations is the same. The bottom line is, everybody
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is looking for a secure remote and resilient way to give their network
administrators a better way to manage the network, and that’s what we do. This is why our customers and partners rely on our Smart Out-of-Band solutions and trust Opengear.” n
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