Midwestern U.S. Telecommunications Company

The Customer

This customer is a small independent telecommunications company providing voice, broadband, wireless, and video services to 50,000 subscribers.

The Challenge

A long-time Infoblox customer, this telecommunications provider uses Infoblox solutions for centralized management of both its corporate network and its Internet service provider (ISP) business. According to the IT manager responsible for these networks, the IT team has several initiatives on its plate, the chief one being simplification of the network environment by automating provisioning.

“What we’re trying to do,” the IT manager says, “is make IT almost invisible to our customers—and specifically our application developers—so they don’t need to understand how our environment is architected.” Another important driver in IT planning is the adoption of IPv6. As the new IP address naming convention comes into use, the days of using spreadsheets to track IP addresses will have to end. So the company needed a platform to do initial testing and proofs of concept, to make sure IPv6 would work across its network.

The Infoblox Solution

To address all these needs, the company is using Infoblox Grid™ running Infoblox DDI services. Infoblox solutions have been deployed in a small segment of its network for about seven years, and have recently been deployed as the primary Domain Name System (DNS) and IP address management (IPAM) system. In addition, the company has Infoblox DNS Firewall to protect the corporate network from DNS-based malware and denial-of-service attacks.

The Results

The IT team is excited about the work that Infoblox is doing to streamline and automate provisioning, especially since the company has multiple vendors and solutions, and the Infoblox environment is capable of managing multiple platforms. Self-provisioning processes are now in place that allow users to go to one place and do much of the work involved.

But when asked about the benefits Infoblox is delivering, the IT manager focuses on the DNS security solution. “DNS Firewall is simple to install,” he says. “In a matter of two or three hours, our engineers had it deployed. As far as the benefits go, with the log output we’ve found instances of malware that we didn’t know we had. Since October, we’ve seen instances of DNS Firewall blocking CryptoLocker.” He goes on to explain that the company’s antivirus system was not catching 100 percent of zero-day attacks or malware, and that DNS Firewall blocks some of those threats that weren’t being prevented by spam filtering.

In fact, the IT team is so impressed with DNS Firewall that they are researching the possibility of deploying it for the company’s ISP customers. That and finishing up the IPv6 proof of concept are the biggest initiatives Infoblox is currently helping with. The IT manager sums up the company’s relationship with Infoblox this way: “From customer service to Professional Services to support calls, Infoblox does an outstanding job.”