Global Financial Services Company

The Customer

This global financial services company had older versions of Microsoft DNS and BIND in various parts of its organization, managed by groups depending on function, geographic location, and other factors.

The Challenge

Using the legacy system to keep all of the different groups distributed around the globe in synch was becoming very, very cumbersome, according to a senior systems architect who wears many technical hats for the company. The results were inadvertent downtime at the group level, and when one group made changes, the other groups weren’t aware of them.

The IT team realized that they needed to update, modernize, and centralize management of the Doman Name System (DNS) infrastructure, and bring control of it to a central location so the system could be managed easily around the globe by a central team. Key goals were to reduce the number of hours spent managing DNS and to operate more efficiently. Based in part on the positive experience that the senior systems architect had with Infoblox solutions at a previous job, the team chose Infoblox as the replacement for the legacy system.

The Infoblox Solution

Looking to Infoblox Professional Services for assistance, the company deployed Infoblox appliances running Infoblox DDI and linked via patented Infoblox Grid™ technology. The first step was to collect data from sites around the world, analyze it, and get it into a format so that it was ready to import. After a couple of tests in a lab environment the team had established, they converted from the legacy system to Infoblox in one night. In fact, from the beginning of the lab tests to complete implementation, the effort took 36 hours—with no DNS downtime at any of the locations.

The Results

The new solution resolved all the issues the company had with its legacy system. In addition, it helped out with another major concern financial institutions face—PCI compliance. The company is not only required to adhere to Payment Card Industry standards; it has one of the strictest interpretations of them. Using the Infoblox solution, the team was able to separate DNS from other parts of the infrastructure so that it can be isolated from sensitive portions of the network. The company anticipates more help from Infoblox in the future. IT is looking to deploy its own private cloud, and is evaluating the Infoblox Network Automation family of products to help implement it.

All in all, the level of satisfaction with the Infoblox solution is high. The company’s senior systems architect says, “Infoblox is the first DNS solution that I’ve ever used that delivered 100 percent of everything as advertised. Quite simply, it just works—simply, efficiently, with no problems.”