My job at Infoblox is meeting the needs of our customers by managing the strategy behind the products we sell today and the products we’re developing for tomorrow. I had an opportunity to fully describe that strategy during our annual Analyst Day in San Francisco. Here’s a condensed version of my presentation.
Infoblox today is the industry leader in DNS, DHCP and IP address management – the category we call DDI. These core network services are essential for building and operating networks that are reliable, efficient, scalable and secure. Our product strategy is based on three challenges facing our customers:
- Larger and more complex enterprise networks.
- Attacks on DNS infrastructure.
- The shift to private, public and hybrid clouds.
It’s not hard to understand why networks are becoming more complex with trends such as Bring Your Own Device (BYOD), virtualization, mobility and the emerging Internet of Things. These trends are putting orders of magnitude more devices on the network, even as data centers are consolidating and virtualizing.
Infoblox is addressing the complexity challenge by increasing the number of our DDI nodes that can be placed on a network and adding support for 10-gigabit Ethernet.
We’re also working to introduce a DDI Orchestrator that provides centralized, global control across multiple enterprise networks, while still allowing some local autonomy for clusters such as individual lines of business and separate geographies. We’re also working on analytics that will give network administrators new insight and control in areas such as capacity planning, security and workload mobility.
Security has never been more important to our customers. According to Arbor Networks, the Domain Name System (DNS) is now tied for first place with HTTP as the top targeted service for application-layer attacks. Yet DNS, which we’ve often described as the “phonebook of the Internet,” needs to be open and available for organizations to function.
We now have a security product portfolio that blocks both external DNS threats from outside the network and internal DNS threats. These threats target DNS infrastructure, seeking to paralyze an organization; to steal data by using DNS as an exfiltration path; and to exploit DNS to install malware.
Because DNS sits at the center of the network, touching all inbound and outbound traffic, other security vendors can partner with us so that our joint customers can build an ecosystem where all security products share threat information and can work together to block malicious activity.
Infoblox is also adding analytics to our DNS security products, so we can detect and block new threats even before they’re added to industry black lists.
Cloud is the new frontier for many of our customers, with enticing promises of enhanced flexibility and scalability. However, the mix of traditional on-premise equipment, private clouds and public clouds brings a new level of complexity to network control – potentially reducing the visibility required for compliance and enforcement, while turning tasks such as IP address management and assigning DNS records into a choke point.
Infoblox has integrated with the major private cloud platforms – including VMware, Cisco, Microsoft and OpenStack – to bring automation and centralization to cloud deployments, even across multiple platforms. And we’ll soon be adding support for public clouds.
In short, Infoblox is investing heavily in security and cloud to extend the value of our customers’ investment in DDI.
If you want to watch my full 35-minute presentation, the replay is available here.