5 Ways Top Organizations Are Optimizing Networking at the Edge

MODERN NETWORKING FOR THE BORDERLESS ENTERPRISE

MODERN NETWORKING FOR THE BORDERLESS ENTERPRISE

A BloxOne™ DDI eBook

Yet the shift to leverage public, private and hybrid cloud networking across the borderless enterprise is becoming more challenging.

Why?The traditional MPLS “hub and spoke” networking model cannot efficiently manage the new level of complexity associated with cloud networking. The model typically requires backhauling network traffic from all locations through a centralized data center to access the cloud, resulting in stifling performance bottlenecks.

In a cloud-first world, the nexus of activity is no longer in your data center; it’s at the network edge. The hub and spoke way of networking cannot keep up with the soaring demand for direct-to-cloud access at the edge.

Unfortunately, many organizations are still relying on siloed hardware that locally manages DNS, DHCP and IP address management (collectively known as DDI) individually for each site. Why does that matter? Because fast, reliable DDI services are essential to all modern networking, including the cloud. Consequently, the “local hardware” management of core DDI services creates a host of problems, including:

Enterprises are growing more dispersed and borderless. Essential talent, branch offices, facilities and partners can be located anywhere in the world—and they need rapid and secure access to critical apps and data to keep business running smoothly. What’s more, with aggressive initiatives around SaaS, IoT, SD-WAN and IPv6, smart organizations are moving to the cloud to accelerate workflows and better support users and sites wherever they happen to be.

DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISES NEED TO EVOLVE. AND FAST.

%Higher costs

Higher latency

Manual errors

Slower performance

Security gaps

No local survivability

Your organization wants to embrace the cloud and all its benefits—yet you need a simpler, more reliable way to manage your network, devices, apps and services across all locations.

How can you solve networking challenges at the edge with fewer enterprise resources and still replicate on-prem experiences for your end users?

Enter cloud-managed DDI. By moving the management plane for DDI from the appliance to the cloud, it enables you to centrally manage your borderless enterprise—and with far greater elasticity, reliability, security and automation than traditional on-premises DDI solutions provide. Plus, cloud-managed DDI reduces latency by ensuring that traffic from all locations connects directly to the cloud through the closest point of presence (PoP). As a result, critical cloud-based apps like Microsoft Office 365 run faster. With today’s rapidly expanding distributed workforce, getting secure access to cloud apps and data as if working from headquarters is a game changer for your employees—and your network management team.

In addition to optimizing network access and performance across all your locations, cloud-managed DDI is also a key enabler of your digital transformation as an organization, and it will accelerate your migration to Secure Access Service Edge (SASE) networking.

DDI (DNS, DHCP and IP address management) services play a central role in every network interaction. They are what keep your enterprise network running. They’re involved in all of your digital business workflows, services, applications and data—regardless of location. DDI unifies the management and automation of these services so your network is always on and runs efficiently as it scales to new users and devices.

For many organizations, cloud-managed DDI provides a more flexible, agile and cost-effective complement to on-premises, server-based DDI solutions. By using lighter virtual or physical appliances at each remote location, core services can be centrally managed in the cloud. No more local configuring of appliances or complex on-site service provisioning. With cloud-managed DDI, you get the benefit of full DDI visibility, automation and reliability —but with lower hardware and operating costs, fewer errors and total control. This opens the door to building a faster, more reliable network experience for users at the edge who want instant access to cloud apps, and a more controlled and efficient management experience for IT pros in the network operations center.

The following edge networking scenarios will give you a better understanding of how cloud-managed DDI can solve many key challenges for your borderless network.

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WHAT DOES CLOUD-MANAGED DDI LOOK LIKE?

WAN/INTERNET

REMOTE/BRANCH OFFICES

Cloud-managed DDI services

HQ data center

Cloud-based apps

NIOSVM or appliance

VM or appliance

VM or appliance

BloxOne DDI

BloxOne DDI

BloxOne DDI

With more uncertainty in the world today than ever, many organizations that want to take advantage of moving to the cloud are still not yet willing to commit the time and resources to a full digital transformation initiative.

However, cloud-managed DDI offers a bridge that allows organizations to integrate core network services, bringing DNS, DHCP and IPAM together on a unified platform. By replacing siloed on-prem DNS and DHCP controllers with cloud-native technology, organizations can take a huge step toward digital transformation through integrated DDI services they can centrally manage in the cloud across all locations, ensuring better branch performance, faster access to cloud-based applications and higher availability.

How cloud-managed and integrated DDI brings it all together

OF THE EDGE

01

centralizing control

A global law firm wanted to improve productivity by migrating workflow to the cloud, while also centralizing control of all remote office networking. After concluding that its network services architecture had to evolve first, it decided the next step should be upgrading DNS and DHCP to cloud-native technology. This shift aligned to its cloud objective and enabled its many branch offices to be centrally managed.

With a lower-cost “upgrade” to cloud-managed DDI services, the firm gained centralized management over previously “siloed” remote locations, local survivability for each site, new and improved security capabilities at the DNS level and improved global load balancing. All at a more affordable and justifiable cost.

>>SUCCESS SPOTLIGHT

multi-office professional services

How cloud-managed DDI accommodates specific needs

AT THE EDGEIncreasing Agility

02

For some borderless enterprises, fully-featured, enterprise-grade DDI services are not needed in all of its branches or remote sites. For example, an organization may already have a DNS service that meets all its needs in every location, but it wants to deploy only DHCP or IP address management services in small regional offices. Similarly, it may wish to expand DDI capabilities in some branches but not others.

Just as common, especially for enterprises that are undergoing digital transformation, it’s important to have the flexibility to roll out DDI capabilities incrementally. They may wish to upgrade DHCP in the near term while keeping their current IP address management solution. They need a DDI solution that protects them from over-provisioning services in remote sites that may go unused for some time yet.

Cloud-based DDI provides the flexibility and agility for enterprises to achieve the right size DDI implementation for every location.

The banking industry is rapidly evolving. Many banks have increasingly embraced the cloud for customer-facing mobile banking services. However, this disruption is causing banks to close retail branches and operate remaining branches more efficiently to drive down costs.

With cloud-managed DDI, not only can banks centrally manage DDI across hundreds of remote sites, they can customize their DDI deployments to meet specific needs in individual branches. They get the level of DDI functionality and capacity that meets their needs at the moment. That might mean DHCP for now and DNS and IP address management down the road. And with the elastic scalability of cloud-based DDI, banks can quickly add or reduce capabilities in branch locations as their business needs dictate. Cloud-based DDI provides the flexibility and agility that distributed organizations need at the edge.

>>SUCCESS SPOTLIGHT

RETAIL BRANCH BANKING

For the borderless enterprise, with growing numbers of remote workers and branch locations, simple, reliable access to mission-critical applications at the network edge is paramount. This requires organizations to move away from traditional MPLS architectures. As noted previously, backhauling network traffic through the data center creates severe latency and bottlenecks for end users in branch offices and remote sites, preventing them from moving at the speed of business.

Modernizing with more agile cloud access to applications like Microsoft Office 365 requires a different infrastructure. One where DDI services can be delivered and managed centrally via the cloud and where traffic from remote locations can connect directly to the closest local PoPs in the cloud without the backhaul bottleneck.

How cloud-managed DDI makes remote offices run better

ACCESS AT THE EDGESIMPLIFYING APPLICATION

03

A top European systems integrator, with offices and customers across the globe, wanted to modernize by migrating to cloud-based applications. It uses its own mission-critical apps as well as Microsoft Office 365, yet the company was besieged by latency issues and reliability problems across remote and branch offices.

Accelerating access to cloud applications required a reimagination at the core. By abandoning a premises-based branch office DDI architecture and moving to cloud-managed DDI, it simplified Internet connectivity and now gives remote workers a more agile, enjoyable network experience with location-aware access to key applications and data. In addition, centralized cloud-based management automates large-scale provisioning, configuration and policy control, making network administration far simpler.

>>SUCCESS SPOTLIGHT

leading systems integrator

When your business depends on connecting vital manufacturing facilities to global supply chain partners and remote offices, the term mission-critical takes on a whole new meaning. Add to that IoT devices that have to communicate 24/7 and reliability, redundancy and survivability become essential.

Application latency is not the only downside to traditional backhauling of DNS and DHCP through a headquarters data center. Backhauling also puts business continuity at risk for branch offices and remote sites because backhauling does not provide local survivability for DNS and DHCP services. If the link to headquarters goes down, because of a power outage or natural disaster, remote locations are not able to reach the central data center for DNS and DHCP resolution. As a result, they lose access to the Internet and cloud-based apps.

To ensure always-on networking for all locations, remote and branch offices need the ability to maintain DDI services locally.

How cloud-managed DDI keeps everything connected 24/7

AT THE EDGEBOOSTING SURVIVABILITY

04

Recently, a global synthetics manufacturer, with dozens of production facilities and branch offices, was spun out of a larger chemical company. It needed to quickly operationalize its own network services, with paramount focus on DNS and DHCP survivability.

Because process continuity was a top priority, the company ruled out DDI options that relied on DNS/DHCP backhaul through the data center. At the same time, traditional server-based on-site DDI solutions did not provide the agility and cost savings the manufacturer required. It felt that the economics and reliability of a cloud-managed solution were a better fit. Using lightweight appliances with built-in redundancies in its manufacturing plants, it deployed cloud-managed DDI across all sites.

The result? Greater resiliency, reliability and local survivability to protect against unplanned network downtime or slowdowns. By moving DDI management to the cloud, the solution also provided unified visibility of network assets and vastly simplified complex networking throughout its distributed operations.

>>SUCCESS SPOTLIGHT

worldwide manufacturer

Many high-growth companies today were born in the cloud and their business is 100% cloud-based. Which means no centralized data center—all apps and services are managed and delivered in the cloud. So when it comes to managing the growth of branch offices and remote locations, it’s challenging to find a solution that is 100% cloud-ready.

Typically, core DDI services like DHCP are managed by hardware routers or servers located at each site. A large enterprise may have hundreds of these throughout its borderless operations. These on-premises devices are often resource-intensive, error prone, cumbersome and hard to scale. In addition, they provide no easy way to monitor and manage multiple locations.

For cloud-born businesses, cloud-managed DDI makes it simple to eliminate resource-heavy physical appliances in branch and remote offices. Instead, lightweight devices or virtual appliances can be deployed in all locations, which enables DDI to be centrally managed in the cloud across all sites.

How cloud-managed DDI helps cloud-born businesses grow

AT THE EDGESCALING

05

A leading streaming service company needed to grow rapidly by establishing new locations—each supporting a range of 25 to 1000s of employees. And yet it struggled with its existing DHCP solution that used local hardware at every site, resulting in office-to-office inconsistencies and inefficient performance.

What’s more, its IT culture is cloud based and it wanted a cloud-based solution that enabled it to view all IP addresses and statistics centrally. The company decided to rethink its approach and deployed a low-cost, cloud-based DHCP implementation using simple bare-metal appliances at each location around the world. This new approach allowed it to manage all remote sites from a central location.

Its new model of cloud-native technology centrally managing each new branch office now gives the streaming service the platform for unlimited expansion at a lower cost per site.

>>SUCCESS SPOTLIGHT

GLOBAL STREAMING COMPANY

BloxOne DDI is the industry’s first DDI solution that makes it possible to centrally manage DDI from the cloud across hundreds to thousands of remote sites with unprecedented cost efficiency. Built from the ground up following cloud-native principles of software development and a microservices-oriented architecture, BloxOne DDI was designed for agility, resilience and extensibility. It vastly simplifies borderless networking by moving DDI control and management to the cloud.

THE KEY TO MODERNIZING YOUR DISTRIBUTED ENTERPRISE

BloxOne DDI

Infoblox created the BloxOne Platform based on its industry leading expertise in enterprise-grade DDI networking. The company enables next-level network experiences with its unique, patented solutions and commands more than 50 percent market share for DDI, comprised of 8,000 customers, including 350 of the Fortune 500.

THE INFOBLOX ADVANTAGE

CORE BENEFITS OF BloxOne DDI

IMPROVES borderless network reliability

ACCELERATES performance and cloud app accessibility

CENTRALIZES cloud-native management and control

AUTOMATES process to reduce errors and inconsistencies

SUPPORTS up to thousands of remote sites

SCALES horizontally for limitless capacity

COMPLEMENTS SD-WAN and SaaS initiatives

LOWERS cost by being lightweight and SASE ready

In every one of these core benefit and success spotlight scenarios, there is a common denominator: traditional networking architecture is no longer effective for managing the explosion of workflow at the edge.

THE NEXT-LEVEL NETWORKING EXPERIENCE

No matter what your objectives, improving your borderless networking experience in a more remote, work-from-home world is now more essential than ever. Cloud-managed DDI, like BloxOne DDI offered by Infoblox, should be at the core of that transformation.

www.infoblox.com/products/bloxone-ddi/

Infoblox enables next-level network experiences with its Secure Cloud-Managed Network Services. As the pioneer in providing the world’s most reliable, secure and automated networks, we are relentless in our pursuit of network simplicity. A recognized industry leader, Infoblox has 50 percent market share comprised of 8,000 customers, including 350 of the Fortune 500.

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