As with cars and designer dogs, hybrid is becoming more the norm with network environments. Businesses are leveraging the cost benefits and scalability of public and private clouds for various purposes, including data storage, disaster recovery, predictive analytics, enterprise applications, and more. But while some functions are being moved to cloud platforms such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), and companies are mixing these up with VMware and/or OpenStack cloud technologies, many enterprises also maintain their traditional on-premises infrastructure.
When it comes to DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (collectively known as DDI), a hybrid environment presents some challenges. As our clients’ needs have changed over the past few years, we’ve evolved with them, providing solutions for a centralized approach to DDI management across all platforms, cloud or on-premises. As an extension of that trend, we now also integrate with Microsoft Azure.
Here’s a brief look at some of the key hybrid environment DDI management challenges we help our clients solve with Infoblox’s actionable network intelligence.
Challenge #1: Siloed Systems
It’s typical for DDI management to become siloed across your various systems, each requiring different management tools, platforms, policies, and approaches. For more effective and hassle-free DDI management, consolidation is key. You need a single-view solution that will allow you to consistently manage DNS, DHCP, and IP addresses across cloud and on-premises platforms and stay within compliance.
Challenge #2: Limited Visibility
Many businesses have limited visibility into the virtual networks, IP addresses, and DNS records that are being assigned—and no correlation of common resources across platforms. It’s important to be able to discover and track records and resources across platforms and cloud environments. For virtual networks, you need a way to automatically document when a VM is destroyed, clean up the DNS record, and release the IP address to ensure information is correct and up to date.
Challenge #3: Manual Processes
If you’re still doing DDI management manually, delays are inevitable, due to multiple handoffs between cloud, network, and security teams. You’ll also likely have more trouble tickets and security gaps. Instead, you can automate provisioning, de-provisioning, and modification of DNS records as part of existing workflows, while maintaining complete oversight as your hybrid cloud evolves.
Infoblox DDI for Azure and Beyond
Our highly automated, elastic, and secure DNS, DHCP, and IP address management solution integrates DDI management of traditional networks and public/hybrid cloud deployments. With Infoblox’s most recent upgrade, IT administrators can extend visibility into Azure resources, and benefit from multi-platform support for better security and audit capabilities for their virtualized and traditional network resources.
For more information about Infoblox DDI and how it can help you simplify DDI management, check out our product datasheet or contact us.