Infoblox Heralds a New Era for DDI
In my CFD22 preview blog, I introduced Infoblox as a company pursuing a single pane of glass for their customers. CFD22 kicked off with Infoblox Chief Product Officer Mukesh Gupta walking us through what he called a reinvention of critical network services.
Some context setting on why the network centricity: In a multi-cloud world, data and application movement is a critical element of IT oversight, not just from a network admin perspective, but also from a perspective of the SecOps team, and even cloud infra-management. Mukesh’s background is deep into networking with stops including Palo Alto Networks, Illumio and Juniper Networks. At Infoblox, Mukesh is responsible for guiding the product strategy and delivery into the market.
Infoblox is all about DDI – DNS, DHCP and IPAM. Network people, after all, have a unique fondness for acronyms. To break that down for those who don’t live in this space, DNS – Domain Name System, DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and IPAM – IP Address Management. Infoblox has been working in this space since their launch of a DNS appliance in 2000, and they claim over 13,000 enterprise customers, including 75% of the Fortune 500.
For a company with a quarter century of development, the current moment of multi-cloud management and the move away from VMware within on-prem environments, together, have placed strain on DDI oversight. Add additional security breaches to the mix, and improved DDI is becoming critical for many organizations. Every cloud provider has its own DNS solution, and this mix of solutions provides complexity to enterprises, something we’ve covered before as a barrier to cloud workload movement across clouds and cloud provider lock-in. Other challenges that Mukesh introduced included a rise of human mistakes, increased costs, IP conflicts, ransomware threats, and zombie assets across clouds.
So how does Infoblox’s solution help with these challenges? As we referenced in the preview blog, Infoblox just released their unified platform for networking and security in a hybrid enterprise. This unified platform encapsulates Network Universal DDI, Security DNS DR, and Comprehensive Asset Visibility, all wrapped in cohesive management. The solution extends across all clouds, on-prem data centers, and branch offices and edge devices down to user systems. The major update is focused on that universal DNS management chasing the single pane of glass for IT administrators. This integrates IP address management across all these domains, eliminating the challenge of IP address conflicts across clouds, and gives much more acute visibility into subnets across public clouds.
What has the customer response been? When asked, Mukesh clarified that many of the elements of the new solution have actually been available for the past five years, so major enterprises are viewing this solution as proven. The universal management has been very well received, with notable deployments achieved by a Fortune 5 company, as well as major airlines, since its introduction in September of last year.
Mukesh was not done. We moved on to a deep dive on DNS, where he introduced urgent challenges with Phishing/Smishing/Quishing, Command and Control, Data Exfiltration, and Prompt Injection. Let’s unpack!
We’ve all heard of phishing, but let’s introduce smishing – phishing by SMS text and quishing – phishing by QR codes. All represent threats to enterprise environments. Command and control attacks involve bad actors communicating and taking over a system within the environment with nefarious intent. Data exfiltration is exactly as it sounds – the unauthorized removal of data to outside of the environment. Finally, prompt injection is very 2025 – tricking large language models into nefarious results within the environment. To fight all these threats, organizations need the help of DNS.
Mukesh introduced some results, claiming that Infoblox is blocking an average of 63 days earlier than the rest of the industry, with over 75% of threats detected before the first DNS query, and over 80% within a single day of the first DNS query.
What’s the TechArena take? I was impressed with the progress towards cohesive management, and more impressed with customer adoption. The delegates in the room who have administration experience in their backgrounds liked the full feature delivery across environments and support for all major cloud providers with others, such as Cloudflare, coming soon. The time for this solution is now, given enterprise desire to migrate VMware instances on-prem and a growing reliance on multiple cloud providers, and this integration of capabilities will be welcomed by administrators seeking enterprise class protection for this complex environment. This solution just makes sense as delivering tangible value.
In my CFD22 preview blog, I introduced Infoblox as a company pursuing a single pane of glass for their customers. CFD22 kicked off with Infoblox Chief Product Officer Mukesh Gupta walking us through what he called a reinvention of critical network services.
Some context setting on why the network centricity: In a multi-cloud world, data and application movement is a critical element of IT oversight, not just from a network admin perspective, but also from a perspective of the SecOps team, and even cloud infra-management. Mukesh’s background is deep into networking with stops including Palo Alto Networks, Illumio and Juniper Networks. At Infoblox, Mukesh is responsible for guiding the product strategy and delivery into the market.
Infoblox is all about DDI – DNS, DHCP and IPAM. Network people, after all, have a unique fondness for acronyms. To break that down for those who don’t live in this space, DNS – Domain Name System, DHCP – Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol, and IPAM – IP Address Management. Infoblox has been working in this space since their launch of a DNS appliance in 2000, and they claim over 13,000 enterprise customers, including 75% of the Fortune 500.
For a company with a quarter century of development, the current moment of multi-cloud management and the move away from VMware within on-prem environments, together, have placed strain on DDI oversight. Add additional security breaches to the mix, and improved DDI is becoming critical for many organizations. Every cloud provider has its own DNS solution, and this mix of solutions provides complexity to enterprises, something we’ve covered before as a barrier to cloud workload movement across clouds and cloud provider lock-in. Other challenges that Mukesh introduced included a rise of human mistakes, increased costs, IP conflicts, ransomware threats, and zombie assets across clouds.
So how does Infoblox’s solution help with these challenges? As we referenced in the preview blog, Infoblox just released their unified platform for networking and security in a hybrid enterprise. This unified platform encapsulates Network Universal DDI, Security DNS DR, and Comprehensive Asset Visibility, all wrapped in cohesive management. The solution extends across all clouds, on-prem data centers, and branch offices and edge devices down to user systems. The major update is focused on that universal DNS management chasing the single pane of glass for IT administrators. This integrates IP address management across all these domains, eliminating the challenge of IP address conflicts across clouds, and gives much more acute visibility into subnets across public clouds.
What has the customer response been? When asked, Mukesh clarified that many of the elements of the new solution have actually been available for the past five years, so major enterprises are viewing this solution as proven. The universal management has been very well received, with notable deployments achieved by a Fortune 5 company, as well as major airlines, since its introduction in September of last year.
Mukesh was not done. We moved on to a deep dive on DNS, where he introduced urgent challenges with Phishing/Smishing/Quishing, Command and Control, Data Exfiltration, and Prompt Injection. Let’s unpack!
We’ve all heard of phishing, but let’s introduce smishing – phishing by SMS text and quishing – phishing by QR codes. All represent threats to enterprise environments. Command and control attacks involve bad actors communicating and taking over a system within the environment with nefarious intent. Data exfiltration is exactly as it sounds – the unauthorized removal of data to outside of the environment. Finally, prompt injection is very 2025 – tricking large language models into nefarious results within the environment. To fight all these threats, organizations need the help of DNS.
Mukesh introduced some results, claiming that Infoblox is blocking an average of 63 days earlier than the rest of the industry, with over 75% of threats detected before the first DNS query, and over 80% within a single day of the first DNS query.
What’s the TechArena take? I was impressed with the progress towards cohesive management, and more impressed with customer adoption. The delegates in the room who have administration experience in their backgrounds liked the full feature delivery across environments and support for all major cloud providers with others, such as Cloudflare, coming soon. The time for this solution is now, given enterprise desire to migrate VMware instances on-prem and a growing reliance on multiple cloud providers, and this integration of capabilities will be welcomed by administrators seeking enterprise class protection for this complex environment. This solution just makes sense as delivering tangible value.
