Kronos

The Customer

Kronos Incorporated is widely recognized as a market and thought leader in managing the workforce. The Company has unrivaled reach with more than 30 million people using a Kronos solution every day. It is focused on delivering software and services that enable organizations to reduce costs, increase productivity, improve employee satisfaction, and ultimately enhance the level of service they provide. Kronos serves customers in more than 60 countries through its network of offices, subsidiaries, and distributors.

Key to serving its global customer base is its own network and enterprise applications that require 24×7 availability. Core network services, including domain name resolution (DNS), IP address assignment and management (DHCP and IPAM) as well as user name and password authentication (RADIUS), are essential to maintaining access to those applications.

The Challenge

As the company has continued to expand operations worldwide, Kronos’ legacy BIND system for delivering DNS was aging, becoming increasingly difficult to administer. Kronos was looking for the best solution to deploy at their headquarters and manage across its branch offices to deliver reliable, secure and scalable core network services. In 2005, Kronos began searching for a solution that could scale to meet its needs.

The Solution

After Kronos conducted an evaluation of several core network services products, it selected Infoblox because of its unique grid technology. The Infoblox grid module links a collection of appliances into a unified, centrally-managed, core network services platform. Benefits include resilient operations, unified management and real-time, secure, system-wide updates. Additionally, Kronos cited delegated administration, integrated IP address management, and the central administration of the grid master as reasons for selecting the Infoblox appliance solution.

Kronos set up Infoblox grid master appliances in high availability pairs at its data centers in Australia, Canada, New England and Oregon. Grid members are deployed at its offices in India, Montreal, Sydney, Wokingham, UK and Belgium. In total, Kronos has 14 appliances deployed worldwide. With delegated administration, Kronos now has a local administrator make changes at any branch office and the changes are propagated appropriately throughout the global grid.

The ROI of the Infoblox solution versus the legacy equipment is clear but the primary beneficiaries of the implementation are the distributed branch offices. If a branch office makes a change to a record,the master in the data center immediately sees it; synchronization happens automatically. Reliability was also essential in Kronos’ product selection process. Because responding to customers is apriority, Kronos has no tolerance for system outages or be exposed to external vulnerabilities.

The Result

The Infoblox solution for core network services provided the resolution to reliably scale Kronos’ infrastructure for future applications and projects.

Doug Tamasanis, Chief IT Architect/Director of Networks and Security at Kronos, commented: “The appeal of Infoblox was the ability to update the code across the grid with the push of a button, saving hours of administrative time. We like the ease of content synchronization through a common console and the delegated administration capability that allows changes made by an administrator in Australia to automatically propagate quickly and reliably throughout the grid.”

Doug concluded, “For deployment purposes, we love that it is an appliance and that we have a hardened, secure system. Infoblox has exceeded our expectations.”