While cloud teams advance delivery speed each year, many branch environments remain mired in sluggish, outdated practices. Sites operate independently, changes require tickets, and outages are unexpected. IDC analyst Brandon Butler and chief evangelist at Infoblox, Cricket Liu explore what happens when cloud operating principles transform branch environments: a unified global control plane, centralized governance, precise blast-radius constraints and trusted telemetry.
One practical scenario: decoupling DNS/DHCP from AD-centric and hub-centric dependencies, modernizing speed, resilience, and security without a disruptive overhaul, backed by NIST SP 800-81r3 guidance.
Designed for director/vice president leaders focused on transformation results, and executives accountable for outcomes, at a moment when frontier AI is compressing both the modernization timeline and the threat landscape that infrastructure has to survive.
Meet the Presenters

Cricket Liu
Chief Evangelist, Infoblox
Cricket is one of the world’s leading experts on the Domain Name System (DNS), and serves as the liaison between Infoblox and the DNS community. Before joining Infoblox, he founded an Internet consulting and training company, Acme Byte & Wire, after running the hp.com domain at Hewlett-Packard. Cricket is a prolific speaker and author, having written a number of books including “DNS and BIND,” one of the most widely used references in the field, now in its fifth edition.

Brandon Butler
Senior Research Manager, IDC
Brandon Butler is a Senior Research Manager within IDC’s enterprise infrastructure global research domain. He focuses on Enterprise Networking as part of the Network Infrastructure and Services subdomain. Brandon’s research covers market and technology trends, forecasts and competitive analysis in enterprise campus, branch, and edge networks. His coverage includes technologies used in local and wide area networking such as Ethernet switching, wireless LAN, routing/SD-WAN, and AI-powered network management systems. Brandon tracks market shares and forecasts, covers key trends shaping end-user and vendor technology strategy, and leads a variety of custom research projects for IDC.



