Truma Accelerates Global Growth with Infoblox Universal DDI™

THE SITUATION

Agile Business Operations Need an Agile Network

Truma’s success depends on its ability to fulfill evolving customer needs, from traditional, fuel-based units to newer, environmentally friendly technologies, such as electric and solar-powered alternatives.

To stay agile, Truma needs a network that is adaptable, fast, reliable, and secure. This network must also align with Truma’s cloud-first strategy, which enables IT to deploy services in the ways that make the most sense. “If a system is better running in the cloud, we take it to the cloud. If it’s better on-premises, we take it on-premises,” said Andreas Schmidt, IT system engineer for Truma.

As the company continues to grow, Truma’s IT organization plays a central role in supporting business expansion and innovation. The team is focused on ensuring the company’s digital infrastructure can adapt quickly to new requirements, integrate emerging technologies, and maintain consistency across systems. The ability to securely scale mission-critical DNS and DHCP services and deliver reliable performance and visibility across the business remains a key part of Truma’s cloud-first strategy.

THE CHALLENGE

Disparate Networking Technologies and Risk Exposure

In recent years, Truma’s network has expanded rapidly through mergers and acquisitions, adding new subsidiaries and preparing for more in the near future. Running network operations seamlessly across all these locations has become increasingly challenging for Truma’s small network team, especially when it comes to the foundational network services that keep these sites connected. Each newly acquired entity brings its own existing DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (DDI) infrastructure and systems. Making them all speak the same language is not easy.

“We faced barriers between systems, which made it difficult to share information and collaborate across entities,” said Schmidt. “It became clear that we needed to centralize and standardize our networking infrastructure, so every location operates on the same foundation for IP services, DNS, and DHCP.”

The company’s two-person IT team in Putzbrunn is responsible for managing DDI for a growing number of global business entities. With limited resources and no centralized management system, maintaining consistency across so many environments posed a significant challenge. “Our network strategy was developed to be scalable,” Schmidt noted. “We don’t have endless people working in IT, and we don’t want to spend time on basic tasks, like bringing up a new DNS zone.”

Previously, bringing a new location online could take several days as configurations had to be built manually. Each entity maintained its own local DNS and IP structure, increasing complexity and risk of configuration errors, which can quickly become customer-facing outages. In one instance, a DNS record tied to a production system was mistakenly deleted, halting operations for several hours until it could be restored. “Production was standing still because of an IT issue,” Schmidt recalled.

The company was also running most of its DNS traffic through Microsoft DNS, Active Directory, and various domain controllers, which required considerable time and effort to manage both internal and external DNS. “There was no real way to streamline this; there was no dashboard to manage it,” Schmidt said.

As the business continued to grow, the dependency on on-premises systems at Truma’s headquarters became a key concern. Any local outage risked interrupting DDI management for remote entities, conflicting with Truma’s goal of a resilient, cloud-first model. “If something happens at headquarters, we want to be able to manage everything from anywhere,” Schmidt explained.

The legacy environment also lacked basic recovery options. “Sometimes we make a wrong selection or delete something by mistake,” Schmidt said. “We wanted a way to restore it quickly without breaking anything permanently.”

In addition to visibility and scalability challenges, Truma also faced growing security demands. Each location operated its own legacy systems and configurations, creating inconsistencies and blind spots that made it difficult to maintain a unified security posture. Schmidt and his team also had to contend with ongoing threats, such as data exfiltration and ransomware, both of which exploit DNS pathways, but lacked a comprehensive way to detect or stop them. With a small IT team responsible for both networking and security, proactive monitoring across environments was nearly impossible.

To reduce risk and simplify management, the company needed a modern, cloud-managed solution that could unify visibility, strengthen security, and scale efficiently across all users and locations, without adding complexity or increasing workload.

THE SOLUTION

From Strong Foundations to Cloud-Ready Network Control

After standardizing DDI management with Infoblox NIOS DDI, Truma’s IT team gained the visibility, reliability, and automation they needed to manage DNS, DHCP, and IP address management across its growing network. The implementation, supported by trusted Infoblox partner 4N IT-Solutions, went smoothly and quickly proved its value. “The implementation was very well planned and worked very smoothly. Honestly, it was one of the best migrations I have seen in my entire career,” Schmidt remarked. The NIOS deployment connected Truma’s headquarters in Putzbrunn with four subsidiaries through the Infoblox Grid, providing redundancy and continuous availability of DDI services. For the first time, the IT team could manage internal and external DNS through a single interface and reduce the time spent on weekly updates from hours to minutes.

As Truma continued to grow, adding new subsidiaries across Europe and North America, the team recognized that while their NIOS foundation had served them well, they would benefit from a pure cloud-based DDI solution. With a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for foundational network services at new locations, they could scale globally, streamline onboarding, and maintain centralized control from anywhere.

Only one solution could meet these needs: Infoblox Universal DDI™ (UDDI) platform, powered by NIOS-X virtual appliances. By adding UDDI, Truma could extend Infoblox’s proven reliability to a cloud-managed architecture, unifying DNS, DHCP, and IP address services across all entities. “We wanted management that isn’t tied to one location, something we could reach from everywhere,” Schmidt explained.

The hybrid design, featuring 10 NIOS-X virtual appliances running on VMware ESX and Microsoft Azure, delivers low-latency local performance alongside centralized, cloud-based control. Now, Schmidt’s team can manage critical network services at any location using UDDI, through a single API and the Infoblox Portal. Standardizing on Universal DDI also gave Truma the confidence to scale its environment as the company grew, supported by built-in automation and rollback capabilities that simplified configuration and reduced administrative effort.

Truma also continues to rely on Infoblox Threat Defense™, now fully integrated into the Universal DDI platform, to protect users and devices across every location. By monitoring every DNS query across the business in real time, Truma can detect and stop threats earlier, before they infect networks and endpoints. “Every DNS query runs through Infoblox Threat Defense. Every part of our business—every device, VPN connection, elevator, or production line—is secured by Infoblox Threat Defense,” Schmidt said.

THE RESULT

Simplicity, Speed, and Scale for a Global Network

For Truma, moving to Universal DDI wasn’t a leap; it was a logical next step. Having already proven the value of Infoblox NIOS, the transition to Universal DDI was fast, smooth, and nearly effortless. “It was just like when we moved from Microsoft DNS to NIOS—no issues at all,” recalled Schmidt. “We prepared in advance, powered up the new appliances, shut down the old ones, and within minutes, everything was running again.”

That seamless migration unlocked a new level of simplicity and speed. Tasks that once took days of manual work can now be completed in minutes through a single, cloud-managed portal. “With Microsoft DNS, even small configuration changes could take hours, sometimes days,” Schmidt said. “Now, with Universal DDI, we can make those changes in just a few minutes.”

That speed has redefined what Truma’s small IT team can accomplish. From their headquarters in Putzbrunn, they now oversee a global network with ease. “Standardizing with Universal DDI let us scale globally, onboarding 10 entities across seven countries, without local partners or additional headcount,” Schmidt said. “That would have been impossible with our old systems.”

Built-in automation and rollback capabilities give Schmidt’s team the confidence to adapt fast and recover instantly, even during large-scale onboarding. “The simplicity of the system is a significant benefit, especially while we’re onboarding multiple organizations,” he said. “We can make changes quickly and restore configurations within minutes without downtime or data loss.”

Universal DDI has also brought unprecedented visibility. Every device, every DNS query, every connection is visible from one portal, eliminating the blind spots that once led to downtime and hesitation. “It’s much safer to make changes in production,” Schmidt explained. “We no longer have to guess whether a change might interfere with other systems. That’s a big improvement in the trust and stability of the system.”

Security is now woven directly into daily network operations through Infoblox Threat Defense, providing DNS-layer protection and real-time insights across all users and locations. “We can just click another button and see the DNS security view in the same portal,” Schmidt said. “With everything connected in one platform, the team can spot and respond to issues faster. We don’t need to search for hours to determine exactly what happened. This makes life a lot easier.”

In addition, Threat Defense provides secure DNS resolution and automatically blocks devices from connecting to known malicious destinations. Using AI and machine-learning behavioral threat detection, it also flags zero-day threats in DNS traffic weeks and even months before an attack can become active.

With Universal DDI and Threat Defense working together, Truma has created a modern, cloud-managed foundation that scales effortlessly while keeping its network secure and resilient. For Schmidt, the biggest success isn’t measured in uptime or latency—it’s in focus. “People across Truma no longer have to think about how things work on the network; they can focus on what they do to satisfy our customers,” he said. “Infoblox works as a hidden champion in the background every day.”