Large Financial Services Organization

The Customer

This U. S. financial services organization has 30,000 employees spread throughout the country and at the time of this story had been an Infoblox customer for more than 10 years.

The Challenge

The company was using a diverse collection of Domain Name System (DNS) and Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP) tools and products, including some from a major vendor. “We had every product under the sun,” says the VP of networking and security responsible for DNS, DHCP, and IP address management (IPAM), “and probably about 30 different instances of different products in different versions. It was extremely cumbersome to support and almost impossible to do any sort of integration.”

The company’s IT staff realized that they needed to simplify and streamline both the organization and the way they managed IT. DNS security was another issue—which had been repeatedly raised by both internal and external auditors. It was clearly time for improvements.

The Infoblox Solution

The company started out with a minimal investment in Infoblox technology, and found that the IT team was able to complete the migration quickly. And in the first year of running in steady state, they saved more $2 million, primarily through reductions in hardware and software and licenses, but also by reducing the number of people needed to support the environment. From this initial successful deployment, the company scaled its Infoblox Grid™ and Infoblox DDI out to the farthest reaches of the enterprise.

The Results

“When we rolled the Infoblox Grid out,” the VP of networking and security says, “our engineers who support the environment were just ecstatic about it. It makes the environment very agile and flexible to support, and eliminates all that overhead that you get when devices fail, and all the worrying about things like resiliency and recovery. And today, the grid really makes it easy, as our business changes, to adapt the environment.”

Now when the IT team brings in new staff, they don’t have to teach them anything complex. And as Infoblox continues to develop its products and platforms and roll out new features, it’s just a matter of turning things on rather than re-architecting or making major configuration changes. This is also true of the numerous new applications that the company has been bringing online to serve Internet and external customers. As lines of business start to move applications that have traditionally been internal-facing out to the web or even to the cloud, the network can adapt quickly without major architectural changes.

Next steps for the company are Infoblox DNS Firewall—which protects DNS servers from malware and denial-of-service attacks—and automated provisioning. The VP of networking and security says, “DNS firewall is something that we’ll be pursuing early this year. For a minimal investment, it’s a big set of features that we can roll out pretty quickly. And then come automated provisioning and being able to manage other vendor platforms.” Regarding DNS Firewall, he points out that no one vendor has all the zero-days threats covered, and DNS is a critical choke point where he can add another layer to help identify and stop them.

About Infoblox in general, he says, “Infoblox rolled out a great vision right from the beginning. They’ve been able to execute on that strategy and deliver. Infoblox has never once caused us an outage, as opposed to other vendors whose products have caused the kind of outages that can result in reputational and financial damage.”