How Infoblox is tackling multicloud complexity and boosting security

Infoblox recently unveiled Universal DDI, a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering designed to simplify and secure network management in the increasingly hybrid and multicloud world.

DDI refers to a set of networking components – DNS (domain name service), DHCP (dynamic host configuration protocol), and IPAM (IP address management) – that are essential for connectivity, performance and security, forming the foundational layer of any network.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Infoblox CEO Scott Harrell explained how Universal DDI’s focus on security, cloud integration and adaptability can address key enterprise challenges.

“What we’ve seen over the last decade or so is the rise of not only cloud, but multicloud,” said Harrell. “We have customers who, of course, still have on-premises infrastructure, but most of them have at least one cloud, if not multiple clouds.”

The adoption of multicloud, while offering agility and scalability, presents significant management hurdles. Harrell pointed out the difficulties arising from disparate operational models, application programming interfaces (APIs), and approaches to DDI across different cloud providers and on-premises systems.

“The challenge is that a lot of the integration between on-premises and cloud systems, and between the clouds themselves, has been pushed back to customers,” he said. “What that means is that there’s a lot of incremental work and effort to make all these things work together in a harmonious fashion.”

This complexity can lead to costly outages, as Harrell illustrated with a real-world example: “I was talking to a big financial customer in the US, and they were pushing updates from one of their cloud vendors back on-premises, and the outage was severe enough where it took off the trading floor long enough that they had to report it to regulators.”

Universal DDI aims to mitigate these risks by providing a unified API and a single point of control for managing DDI components across environments, simplifying automation, reducing deployment times and minimising the risk of errors. Harrell cited another customer example where Universal DDI helped to reduce application deployment time from weeks to about 15 minutes.

Furthermore, Infoblox’s “NIOS-X as a service” lets organisations deploy DNS and DHCP servers as a service anywhere in the world. Harrell said the service is suited to organisations with distributed operations and limited IT staff at remote locations, noting that a major airline is evaluating the service to improve connectivity at global facilities with minimal IT infrastructure.

Universal DDI can also tear down silos between networking, security and cloud operations teams by removing traditional friction points and automating tasks that previously required manual intervention and service tickets, Harrell noted.

“For example, if I need to know what device an IP address was assigned to because I suspect that device has been breached, it’s not a simple task for network operations to figure that out because that IP address may have been meted out six or seven times.

“We can make that an automated task by auto-populating the SIEM [security information and events management] with the information, so the incident response team can immediately do the investigation and doesn’t even have to raise a service ticket to network operations,” he explained.

Beyond DDI, Infoblox’s Universal Asset Insights offering provides visibility over an organisation’s assets across on-premises and cloud environments, improving security and optimising costs for customers.

“As far as I know, we’re the only ones who are able to unify your visibility across on-premises environments and cloud in a very simple way for all your assets,” Harrell claimed. This helps organisations identify “zombie assets” which are not only unused and consuming resources, but also expanding the attack surface.

On opportunities in Asia-Pacific, Harrell expressed confidence in Infoblox’s market position and highlighted strong growth, particularly in Japan, Australia, New Zealand and Southeast Asia. He attributed the company’s success to continued investment and strong leadership in the region.

When asked about targeted industries for Universal DDI, Harrell said Infoblox focuses on cloud-first organisations that are actively using cloud services. However, he noted that it also addresses the needs of customers that are looking to extend their on-premises DDI fabric to the cloud.

“We think Universal DDI enhances our product portfolio, but more importantly, it solves some real key problems that can make a huge difference to customers and help them become more competitive, innovate faster and be more secure,” said Harrell.