National Financial Services Company in Asia Deploys Seamless Infoblox DDI Solution to Increase Business Agility

The Challenge – Supporting a Fast-Growing Financial Services Company

Originally founded in the mid-2000s, this financial services company grew quickly over the years, adding many new branches and locations across the region. In the early years, the company’s networking and DNS infrastructure was a mix of commodity off-the-shelf servers and routers, with IPAM and DHCP operations largely handled on a manual basis and through Microsoft Directory Services. By the mid-2010s, when the company was converted from a private limited company to a public limited company, IT decision makers realized that existing infrastructure was limiting opportunities for growth. It was at this time the relationship with Infoblox began.

“Going back many years, configuring DNS and DHCP were a technical challenge for us that was holding back our business growth,” said a network IT professional at the organization. “We had to manually assign static IPs for all our locations, which was time consuming and inflexible. Transitioning to Infoblox made it far easier for us to manage the DNS and DHCP for our endpoints. This was the principal reason we wanted to move to a comprehensive solution where Infoblox would be handling DNS, DHCP and then IPAM also across the entire organization.”

The Solution – Infoblox NIOS DDI

The initial engagement involved the deployment of two Trinzic 1505 appliances within the organization’s two primary data centers. These appliances ran Infoblox NIOS DDI with Grid technology used to integrate and manage the solution, and also provide business continuity. Infoblox NIOS made it possible to easily deploy and manage versatile, secure and cost- effective DNS and DHCP services. The solution also automated the error-prone and time-consuming manual tasks associated with managing distributed networks, providing immediate improvement in the management of DNS on its endpoints and the ability to deploy applications much faster than before. The combination of smoother operations through automation enabled the organization to reach growth objectives.

“During this time, we grew to become one of the largest financial services players in Asia,” they said. “We had grown from a few business lines to a well-diversified portfolio of business lines. At the same time, however, we were still running some of our DNS operations on Microsoft. Not having a uniform networking operations infrastructure wasn’t a problem early on, but created more complications as we grew. It was at this time when we decided to fully roll out Infoblox across the entire organization.”

They added three new Trinzic 2505 appliances to expand its NIOS and Grid footprint as well as implement the Infoblox Reporting and Analytics solution. The upgrade enabled the organization to begin supporting primary and secondary endpoints throughout Asia — 36,000 endpoints in total. Reporting and Analytics enabled the organization to more closely monitor and analyze its network with an eye towards boosting reliability and strengthening security

The Results – Full Automation to Support a Growing Global Brand

With five Trinzic devices now sited at its two major data center locations, they were able to automate all aspects of DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) throughout the organization. The benefits of this solution were multifold. “Today, if by any chance there was a disaster and a key server site is lost or experiences connectivity issues, Infoblox makes it possible for us to invoke disaster recovery through the Grid and source core network services from geographically dispersed locations,” said their network IT executive. “We can get any affected site back up and running in minutes, or even seconds. We also now have complete flexibility in assigning dynamic IP addresses, which allows us to proactively respond to business priorities. It’s a seamless solution in that regard and makes our business more agile.”

The organization has seen measurable improvement in application performance as well. Server and
propagation delays between clients and DNS servers can be a limiting factor in application performance for many organizations, especially as browser-based and cloud-based applications increasingly draw static and dynamic content from different servers that require multiple DNS requests per page. The IT executive reflected that “with the survivable, high-performance local DNS services delivered by NIOS and Grid, we can ensure peak performance for applications at all our branch locations and on all our endpoints.”

The Infoblox Reporting and Analytics solutions drive improvements as well. “Network visibility and insight have become much more important to us as our network has grown increasingly complex and cloud-powered,” they mention. “Reporting and Analytics gives us the big picture we need to make fast, accurate decisions to improve performance, security and availability—even as our network is now extending across distributed on-premises, virtual and cloud infrastructure.”

Conclusion – A Solid Working Relationship

In the course of growing its network over the years, the team at the financial institution has considered various solutions to improve its DNS operations, but has consistently chosen to work with Infoblox. “We have looked at many alternatives—from trying to optimize our original Directory Services infrastructure to looking at offerings from vendors such as Efficient IP,” they said. “These were all workable options, but the difference is that they require quite a bit more interaction and improvisation. A lot more is possible with Infoblox. It automates all of the most critical aspects of DNS management, which frees us to concentrate on the big picture of maintaining the network to support key business objectives.”