Covering Disruptive Technology Powering Business in The Digital Age

Written by: Martin Dale Bolima, Tech Journalist, AOPG.

The IT landscape may be changing, but its primordial role in business isn’t.

In fact, one can argue that IT’s role today might even be more important in this era when digital transformation is a differentiator in the cutthroat world of business. There’s just a slight complication: Today’s evolving IT infrastructure has become a potpourri of environments, making it more and more challenging to manage and necessitating a powerful interconnected network that is as reliable as it is secure.

It is exactly the kind of network Infoblox enables, supporting organisations in their digital transformation efforts with innovative solutions that support Domain Name System (DNS), Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), and IP address management. These services are collectively known as DDI, and they make all network interactions possible—seamlessly and securely.

But networks are evolving—or, as Infoblox would say, the game is changing. The cloud networking and security services leader is responding accordingly, changing the game with groundbreaking innovations to its already robust DDI management solutions.

“Your IT infrastructure is the lifeblood of your business. And if you’re like most companies today, that infrastructure is a hybrid ecosystem of cloud applications, network databases, and decentralised services. Each part has its own critical function, and it all depends on reliable DNS and DHCP,” said Cricket Liu, respected author and Chief DNS Architect at Infoblox, in his opening keynote at the Infoblox Universal DDI Virtual Launch. “In fact, DDI is as foundational to your IT infrastructure as the grid is to delivering electricity. Think about it. DDI is the universal backbone that directs seamless communication throughout your network. Without it, nothing works.”

That universal backbone just got a massive upgrade with the launch of Infoblox’s Universal DDI Product Suite​, a set of proprietary solutions that enables cohesive DDI management, comprehensive asset visibility, and proactive security by breaking down silos across NetOps, CloudOps, and SecOps—all offered via adaptive deployment models that give Infoblox customers additional flexibility.

Upgrading the Network to Empower the Business

The California-based company is so far the only cloud networking and security services provider to equip IT and business leaders with this level of cohesive DDI management. The newly announced automation-ready suite empowers teams to centrally manage DNS, DHCP, and IP addresses faster and with less effort. It also helps customers maintain centralised control even while using multiple DNS providers and gain in-depth views and contextual understanding across the entirety of their network through Universal Asset Insights. Additionally, because Infoblox’s Universal DDI is fully SaaS-based, it can be provisioned in mere minutes and its operational costs are reduced substantially.

“We started using DDI to provide incomparable visibility into networks. So, we know which devices are on the network and where they are, but also what they’re doing. We use DDI to bridge on-premises and cloud networks, provide a single seamless namespace that lets users and applications access resources wherever they are,” Liu explained in the launch. “And we’re using DDI to secure our networks, to prevent our users from inadvertently going to phishing sites, to stop malware from infiltrating our networks, and even when it manages to find its way in, to neutralise it and prevent it from doing damage. To do all of this, you need a rock-solid DDI infrastructure. And I am so proud that Infoblox has been helping companies build that infrastructure for more than 25 years.”

These innovations couldn’t have come at a better time as 91% of global organisations report using two or more cloud service providers to innovate faster, streamline operations, and modernise their workloads. Having multiple environments, in turn, is a recipe for complexity, with the chances of human error increasing exponentially. Worse, managing multiple siloed DNS environments reduces agility and increases operational costs, while fragmented IP address management across multiple public clouds and on-premises infrastructure creates IP conflicts that can potentially result in network and application outages. In addition, the lack of centralised visibility across hybrid clouds can cause zombie or orphaned workloads that can pose security risks and add to the overall expenditures.

Then again, as Liu pointed out in his short opening presentation, “many enterprises have yet to unleash the full power of DDI. Infoblox’s Universal DDI aims to give organisations the capabilities to do just that…

“What we’re introducing today will not only bring CloudOps and NetOps teams together, but also unite third-party infrastructure, and make your network automation-ready,” he said. “It will redefine DDI as the hidden powerhouse of network management”

Exploring the Universal DDI Product Suite 

The Infoblox Universal DDI Product Suite includes three new offerings:

• Infoblox Universal DDI Management.This industry-first solution allows customers to automate their cross-cloud DDI environments seamlessly to accelerate their business operations. It improves efficiency and reliability and prevents network outages with policy-driven network and IP address allocation across the entire hybrid, multi-cloud estate. Its capabilities also enable faster releases and reduce customer maintenance burdens. It also allows customers to easily manage third-party DNS services like Amazon Route 53, Azure DNS, and Google Cloud DNS, centralising DNS management and simplifying it as well.
• Infoblox Universal Asset Insights.Offering an unrivalled breadth of discovery sources, this solution enables a unified, comprehensive, and context-rich view of assets across hybrid, multi-cloud environments. It pioneers discovery, analytics, and remediation across an organisation’s entire digital estate by extending DNS and DHCP to IP address management and allows for continuous updates to the IP address management inventory. This helps organisations eliminate the need for outdated, cumbersome, and error-prone manual tracking methods. Universal Asset Insights also automatically identifies unused IP addresses and zombie workloads, significantly reducing operational expenses and exposure to security risks.
• NIOS-X-as-a-Service. This solution is purpose-built to extend critical network services as close to users and workloads as possible without the need to deploy any additional infrastructure, thus keeping deployment and operational costs low. NIOS-X-as-a-Service also offers the operational simplicity CloudOps teams need as well as resilience, consistency, visibility, and security. This single solution satisfies the demands of diverse IT operations teams. With NIOS-X-as-a-Service, IT teams can modernise on-premises Microsoft DNS through rapid deployment, streamline multi-cloud DNS by consolidating cloud-native services onto one unified solution, and optimise branch operations with infrastructure-free DNS and DHCP services.

The Infoblox Universal DDI Product Suite is accessible and managed through a unified Infoblox Portal, ensuring ease of access and helping IT teams work more effectively together.

Built to Address the Challenges of Modern Networks

Scott Harrell, President and CEO at Infoblox, noted in his own keynote at the launch that Infoblox is specifically designed to solve major pain points companies themselves have pinpointed.

“We invented this solution based on the challenges we were hearing from our customers. For instance, not long ago, I had a conversation with a new leader at a major bank, and this team was struggling to move as fast as they wanted because the cloud and networking teams were operating in silos and often communicating their needs via service tickets. Not only was this horribly inefficient, it resulted in poor outcomes for the business,” he said. “New applications were taking two weeks to deploy globally. By integrating Infoblox solutions across their network and cloud domains, they shrunk deployment time to 24 hours at first and then further optimised their time to deploy a new application globally to only 15 minutes. This acceleration has massive business benefits.”

This same acceleration, though, cannot be a one-time thing. According to Harrell, it must be repeatable, cost-efficient, and highly scalable manner. This is why Infoblox is on a mission to unite cloud, networking, and security operations to help organisations move fast and with confidence, fully believing that “DDI is as fundamental to our customers’ operations as the grid is to deliver electricity and must be managed as such.”

“For today’s global businesses, a DDI failure can be even more catastrophic than a localised power outage. Airlines ground flights, ports close, banks can’t process transactions, and hospitals can’t access medical records. Just like power grids, if you lose your connection, your whole business goes dark,” Harrell explained.

Ultimately, preventing such a catastrophe is the endgame of Infoblox’s new game-changing innovations—and they couldn’t have come at a better time because the network needs to keep pace with the rapidly evolving IT landscape.

Otherwise, too many businesses might go dark.

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