As enterprises have become more reliant on technology, system downtime has evolved from an annoyance to something that can singlehandedly diminish productivity. There’s nothing worse than seeing the IT department scrambling while every other employee is forced to sit idle.
As if that weren’t bad enough, the cost of downtime is becoming outrageous. Research firm Gartner calculated the average downtime cost at $336,000 per hour, with potential spikes up to $540,000 per hour. The Ponemon Institute, a security consulting firm, pegged similar numbers: $474,000 per hour. In February of 2015, research firm Infonetics calculated, based on a survey of 205 medium and large business in North America who’d suffered from downtime, that downtime can cost up to $100 million per year.
That’s why Infoblox is so proud that we have customers who say we help them avoid downtime. Take Adobe Systems, the venerable Silicon Valley pioneer behind creative graphics tools and productivity applications. It has more than 1,100 external domains, many of which are key to its business. As a result, efficient management of DNS, DHCP, and IP addresses (DDI) is crucial to both the company’s reputation and its success.
Before Adobe switched to the Infoblox DDI solution, its engineers suffered through many sleepless nights. When Brent Hetherwick joined Adobe as technical lead, the company was running a legacy system that caused a patching-related outage which took 24 hours to resolve. “I was called in the middle of the night almost every week,” Hetherwicks says. He had used Infoblox in a previous job, and designed a new DDI infrastructure for Adobe based on the Infoblox DDI solution.
In addition to more uptime, Infoblox DDI has given Adobe better resource utilization. Its global footprint of 65 DDI devices is now handled by the equivalent of just one-and-a-half full-time employees. Later, Adobe added other tools, including Infoblox DNS Firewall—which detects and blocks malware communications to bad domains—and security-hardened appliances running external DNS Security, which provides defense against DNS-based attacks such as floods, reflection/amplification, NXDOMAIN, DNS hijacking, and others.
“Infoblox has given us a very, very solid platform,” says Simran Sandhu, Adobe manager of global infrastructure. “It works very reliably with little maintenance. And when there have been issues, the response from Infoblox support teams has been very positive.
Adobe Systems is also a customer of Infoblox’s latest Machine Readable Threat Intelligence service, through our acquisition earlier this year of IID (www.infoblox.com/iid). The acquisition enables us to provide the world’s first enterprise-grade DDI platform that combines contextual network data with federated threat intelligence and a dedicated threat research team to deliver context-aware threat mitigation using infrastructure that customers already have in place. Today, many organizations are mired in confusion when it comes to securing their networks and broader IT infrastructure. The combined solution greatly improves operational viability, allowing network and security teams to easily prioritize threat response at scale, based on enterprise context and risk. Infoblox enables our customers to go beyond protecting on-premise devices to also protect company managed devices that are off-premise. These are much-needed capabilities as organizations become more connected, mobile and global.
For the full Adobe case study, click here.
