Analysis: Infoblox looks to change the ops game with Universal DDI Product Suite

Cloud networking and safety firm Infoblox Inc. at the moment launched a brand new suite known as the Common DDI Product Suite with an intention to enhance collaboration and effectivity amongst NetOps, SecOps and CloudOps groups.

The brand new Infoblox suite ought to assist take away operational silos and improve the administration of DNS, DHCP and IP deal with providers, collectively often known as DDI, in multicloud and hybrid environments. I attended a briefing with a number of Infoblox executives, together with Dave Signori, vice chairman of product administration. The corporate says the product suite will present options to simplify community administration, enhance asset visibility and improve safety.

As they prepped the rollout, Signori mentioned they spoke to a number of prospects. Every had an outage lately. One was a worldwide financial institution outage that arose due to poorly executed DNS updates. One other was an utility outage at a media firm as a result of they had been self-managing their Web Protocol deal with administration or IPAM. He mentioned that within the early days, many apps had been remoted, and there wasn’t a lot hybrid multicloud taking place.

“It was OK,” he mentioned. “However, in the end, these needed to come collectively. A mistake was made — just because there wasn’t coordination with the on-prem networking IPAM crew, and the general public cloud was managing the IPAM. There was an IP overlap, and that led to an utility outage. So IP deal with overlaps change into routing issues and utility outages.”

One other difficulty they noticed was security-related — a ransomware assault at a healthcare firm. This firm was utilizing Infoblox Menace Protection, so how did it occur? “They’d Menace Protection working, however they weren’t utilizing it to implement or monitor,” he mentioned. “It was simply amassing and logging. They had been utilizing it as shelfware. They known as us and mentioned, ‘Hey, test it out.’”

When the healthcare firm checked out Menace Protection, Signori mentioned it noticed it had detected the ransomware, however it was ignoring it. “And that instantly made them notice, ‘Hey, we’ve received to begin utilizing this product,’” Signori mentioned. The corporate began using it for monitoring and deliberate to make use of it for enforcement.

Key elements of the Common DDI Product Suite

All of this investigation led to Infoblox releasing its Common DDI Product Suite, which incorporates these three key elements:

1. Common DDI administration allows centralized administration of DNS, DHCP and IP deal with providers throughout varied cloud and on-premises environments. The corporate designed it to enhance agility and simplify operations with automation and policy-driven configurations. It supplies the flexibility to handle third-party DNS providers resembling Amazon Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, and Azure DNS, which ought to scale back the necessity for a number of interfaces and enhance effectivity throughout hybrid multicloud environments.
2. Common Asset Insights presents a complete view of community property by consolidating asset knowledge from a number of environments right into a single platform. It goals to get rid of handbook monitoring, which is susceptible to errors, by automating the invention and administration of IP addresses, DNS and DHCP providers. It additionally helps establish and take away unused or orphaned workloads, lowering operational prices and minimizing safety dangers.
3. NIOS-X as a service allows the deployment of essential community providers like DNS and DHCP with out requiring on-premises infrastructure. This infrastructure-free mannequin must be good for organizations trying to scale their operations whereas lowering deployment and upkeep prices. It allows resilience, scalability and enhanced visibility throughout each on-premises and cloud-based environments whereas offering operational simplicity for CloudOps groups and serving to meet the calls for of NetOps and SecOps groups.

Assembly hybrid and multicloud challenges

As organizations worldwide undertake multicloud methods, managing community providers has change into extra advanced.

Infoblox designed its Common DDI Product Suite to deal with these complexities by offering a unified platform for managing essential community providers throughout a number of cloud suppliers and on-premises environments. Integrating automation, centralization and visibility helps organizations scale back human errors, stop outages and handle IP deal with conflicts, all of that are frequent points in fragmented DNS environments.

The necessity for improved community administration has change into extra pressing as organizations shift towards cloud-first methods. By 2025, Infoblox says, it expects greater than 85% of organizations could have embraced a cloud-first precept, which underscores the necessity for options like Common DDI that provide seamless integration and administration throughout a number of cloud environments.

Some ultimate ideas

The Common DDI Product Suite builds on Infoblox’s historical past of innovation within the DDI market. The corporate first launched the NIOS platform greater than twenty years in the past and has repeatedly developed its choices to satisfy organizations’ altering wants.

The brand new product suite is positioned as a game-changer within the trade. It addresses the ache factors of managing multicloud environments, which frequently embrace elevated operational prices, IP conflicts and utility outages.

Along with streamlining community administration, the suite ought to scale back operational prices by eliminating zombie workloads whereas bettering general community efficiency and safety.

I’m optimistic in regards to the Common DDI Product Suite’s potential. It comes on the proper time and addresses the rising complexity of community administration in hybrid and multicloud environments.

The suite’s capabilities, notably integrating SaaS-based deployment fashions and automation instruments, ought to drive quicker service supply, improved operational effectivity and enhanced safety. The brand new Infoblox providing additionally aligns with broader market developments, together with the rising adoption of multicloud and cloud-first methods.

Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Analysis, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this text for SiliconANGLE.

Picture: TK