On June 17, we hosted the latest Infoblox User Group meeting in central London.
I always make every effort to attend our User Groups because I find them extremely valuable. Why? Well, in many ways the clue is in the name. They’re all about the people who use Infoblox solutions every day. User Groups are a forum for our customers to meet up and talk, and for us to share information on Infoblox’s product roadmap and future vision.
But more than that, User Groups let us to listen to our users. We take these opportunities very seriously, and it’s not unusual for new product enhancements to come out of these sessions. For example, Sohail Parekh, our executive vice president of engineering, revealed that our multi-grid orchestrator was born in this very User Group last year.
This year, our vice president of product management, Jonathan Gohstand, walked everyone through Infoblox’s product roadmap, with questions and suggestions from the floor bringing up new ideas for Sohail to take back to engineering. Jonathan also revealed that he is refusing to stop codenaming new products after his favourite operas, despite opposition from the rest of the business. (Recently Jonathan asked me to name my favourite aria. Judging by his reaction, Arya Barirani, our vice president for product marketing, was not the answer he was looking for, although personally I think this demonstrates my loyalty to Infoblox.)
Security remains a major pain point for all businesses, and Cricket Liu, our chief DNS architect, spoke to users about the importance of securing DNS. Although DNS is growing in popularity as an attack vector, we tend to get a mixed reaction from the market when we talk about its importance. Some companies don’t think security is important (yes, really). Some are sceptical of the value of security solutions. Others think security is simply someone else’s problem. We think it’s our responsibility to educate companies on the dangers posed by unsecured DNS. All the attendees at Cricket’s session on DNS security threats and solutions are now better placed than most to make up their own minds.
In my introduction on the day, I referenced Infoblox’s threat assessment tool, which uses packet capture of network traffic to undertake DNS security assessments. The anonymised report I used as an example was 12 pages long, and most of it was red (and I probably don’t need to tell you that red is bad). The report in this case found over 4,000 suspicious queries. I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to know that.
We also heard from Scott Fulton, EVP of products, on cloud architecture evolution, and we are extremely grateful to one of our customers from a large financial group, who shared a powerful story of his company’s experience with Infoblox solutions and showed what they have been able to achieve as a result.
As we’ve seen, these User Groups really do drive new ideas, many of which show up on the product roadmap. I want to thank all of our users for their ideas and feedback, and encourage them to continue submitting suggestions.