Cloud networking and security company Infoblox Inc. today launched a new suite called the Universal DDI Product Suite with an aim to improve collaboration and efficiency among NetOps, SecOps and CloudOps teams.
The new Infoblox suite should help remove operational silos and enhance the management of DNS, DHCP and IP address services, collectively known as DDI, in multicloud and hybrid environments. I attended a briefing with several Infoblox executives, including Dave Signori, vice president of product management. The company says the product suite will provide solutions to simplify network management, improve asset visibility and enhance security.
As they prepped the rollout, Signori said they spoke to several customers. Each had an outage recently. One was a global bank outage that arose because of poorly executed DNS updates. Another was an application outage at a media company because they were self-managing their Internet Protocol address management or IPAM. He said that in the early days, many apps were isolated, and there wasn’t much hybrid multicloud happening.
“It was OK,” he said. “But, sooner or later, those had to come together. A mistake was made — simply because there wasn’t coordination with the on-prem networking IPAM team, and the public cloud was managing the IPAM. There was an IP overlap, and that led to an application outage. So IP address overlaps become routing problems and application outages.”
Another issue they saw was security-related — a ransomware attack at a healthcare company. This company was using Infoblox Threat Defense, so how did it happen? “They had Threat Defense running, but they weren’t using it to enforce or monitor,” he said. “It was just collecting and logging. They were using it as shelfware. They called us and said, ‘Hey, check it out.'”
When the healthcare company looked at Threat Defense, Signori said it saw it had detected the ransomware, but it was ignoring it. “And that immediately made them realize, ‘Hey, we’ve got to start using this product,'” Signori said. The company started employing it for monitoring and planned to use it for enforcement.
Key components of the Universal DDI Product Suite
All of this investigation led to Infoblox releasing its Universal DDI Product Suite, which includes these three key components:
- Universal DDI management enables centralized management of DNS, DHCP and IP address services across various cloud and on-premises environments. The company designed it to improve agility and simplify operations with automation and policy-driven configurations. It provides the ability to manage third-party DNS services such as Amazon Route 53, Google Cloud DNS, and Azure DNS, which should reduce the need for multiple interfaces and improve efficiency across hybrid multicloud environments.
- Universal Asset Insights offers a comprehensive view of network assets by consolidating asset data from multiple environments into a single platform. It aims to eliminate manual tracking, which is prone to errors, by automating the discovery and management of IP addresses, DNS and DHCP services. It also helps identify and remove unused or orphaned workloads, reducing operational costs and minimizing security risks.
- NIOS-X as a service enables the deployment of critical network services like DNS and DHCP without requiring on-premises infrastructure. This infrastructure-free model should be good for organizations looking to scale their operations while reducing deployment and maintenance costs. It enables resilience, scalability and enhanced visibility across both on-premises and cloud-based environments while providing operational simplicity for CloudOps teams and helping meet the demands of NetOps and SecOps teams.
Meeting hybrid and multicloud challenges
As organizations worldwide adopt multicloud strategies, managing network services has become more complex.
Infoblox designed its Universal DDI Product Suite to address these complexities by providing a unified platform for managing critical network services across multiple cloud providers and on-premises environments. Integrating automation, centralization and visibility helps organizations reduce human errors, prevent outages and manage IP address conflicts, all of which are common issues in fragmented DNS environments.
The need for improved network management has become more urgent as organizations shift toward cloud-first strategies. By 2025, Infoblox says, it expects more than 85% of organizations will have embraced a cloud-first principle, which underscores the need for solutions like Universal DDI that offer seamless integration and management across multiple cloud environments.
Some final thoughts
The Universal DDI Product Suite builds on Infoblox’s history of innovation in the DDI market. The company first introduced the NIOS platform more than two decades ago and has continuously evolved its offerings to meet organizations’ changing needs.
The new product suite is positioned as a game-changer in the industry. It addresses the pain points of managing multicloud environments, which often include increased operational costs, IP conflicts and application outages.
In addition to streamlining network management, the suite should reduce operational costs by eliminating zombie workloads while improving overall network performance and security.
I’m optimistic about the Universal DDI Product Suite’s potential. It comes at the right time and addresses the increasing complexity of network management in hybrid and multicloud environments.
The suite’s capabilities, particularly integrating SaaS-based deployment models and automation tools, should drive faster service delivery, improved operational efficiency and enhanced security. The new Infoblox offering also aligns with broader market trends, including the growing adoption of multicloud and cloud-first strategies.
Zeus Kerravala is a principal analyst at ZK Research, a division of Kerravala Consulting. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE.