SOLUTION NOTE
INFOBLOX UNIVERSAL
ASSET INSIGHTS™
Unparalleled visibility across hybrid
and multi-cloud networks
SUMMARY
In-depth, always up-to-date visibility and insights across hybrid and multi-cloud networks.
Infoblox Universal Asset Insights™ automates the discovery and analysis of assets across public clouds, on-premises network, IoT/OT devices and third-party applications for improved network visibility, operational efficiency and contextual awareness across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
OVERVIEW & CHALLENGES
Organizations continue to adopt cloud strategies and are challenged by the mix of disparate systems for managing network services across hybrid and multi-cloud environments, partner networks and a multitude of underlying physical devices. The absence of centralized visibility exacerbates these challenges, resulting in a lack of awareness of what is on the network, what is happening on the network and who is responsible for it.
Limited visibility into subnets and other network resources provisioned can lead to misconfigurations and outages. Manually tracking the IP addresses and resources using spreadsheets or other in-house tools can lead to visibility gaps or resource conflicts, resulting in longer troubleshooting times and the inability to manage growing environments at scale.
Lack of centralized visibility across hybrid networks is also a security risk. Cloud sprawl is a significant issue for organizations, and the inability to track what is on the network and its usage can result in undiscovered zombie assets and orphaned resources and services, leading to increased costs or exploitation by malicious actors.
THE INFOBLOX SOLUTION
Universal Asset Insights automates the discovery and analysis of IP-based and non-IP-based assets across public clouds, on-premises networks, IoT/OT devices and third-party applications and keeps IP address management (IPAM) updated without manual intervention. The expanded asset discovery provides unparalleled, contextualized and near–real-time visibility into the extensive on-premises assets and multi-cloud network assets.
Combined with Infoblox critical network services, including DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI), Universal Asset Insights enhances the scope of network visibility and accuracy of IPAM. NetOps, CloudOps and SecOps now have a trusted infrastructure-wide central repository of assets and connectivity details, which improves network visibility, operational efficiency and contextual awareness across the entire environment.
Figure 1: Overview of Infoblox Asset Insights
USE CASE: HYBRID AND MULTI-CLOUD VISIBILITY
IT teams juggle between multiple tools or instances of cloud applications to manage and monitor their complex network infrastructure. Lack of visibility leads to increased troubleshooting time and outages caused by incomplete or missing due to IP conflicts.
Universal Asset Insights:
- Automates network discovery of on-premises and cloud assets
- Provides up-to-date, near–real-time visibility, allowing faster troubleshooting
- Identifies overlapping and conflicting IP addresses or subnets that can potentially cause application outages
- Extends visibility into the utilization of subnet space that the NetOps teams lack in public clouds
Figure 2: Hybrid and multi-cloud visibility and insights
USE CASE: CENTRALIZED OPERATIONS
IT teams are siloed and plagued with incomplete network views and varied challenges—the NetOps team has no visibility into the network usage, the CloudOps team lacks the ability to manage its own IP range, which slows automation processes, and the SecOps team lacks network data for early threat detection.
Universal Asset Insights:
- Enables cross-functional collaboration across NetOps, CloudOps and SecOps.
- Bridges the visibility gap with a unified asset inventory of IP-based and non-IP-based assets.
- Extends Domain Name System (DNS) to asset management.
- Provides an authoritative network source of truth and centralized operations.
Figure 3: Centralized operations with asset inventory
USE CASE: COST AND RESOURCE OPTIMIZATION
Relying on manual checks for resource management and the inability to track network usage can result in undiscovered zombie assets and orphaned resources, leading to higher costs, operational inefficiencies and potential vulnerabilities.
Universal Asset Insights:
- Automatically delivers in-depth analysis and insights of assets across hybrid and multi-cloud networks.
- Monitors network with near–real-time widgets to view zombie cloud assets, unregistered assets, non-compliant assets and more.
- Allows re-allocation and retirement of unutilized resources.
- Lowers operational expenses, improves security and optimizes resource allocations.
Figure 4: Cost and Resource Optimization
CONCLUSION
Organizations with hybrid and multi-cloud infrastructures struggle to have comprehensive visibility into assets they own as they lack an always up-to-date asset inventory. They often end up using multiple IT tools for different cloud and branch networks, which hampers network agility and cost and operational efficiency. Lack of network visibility results in overlapping IPs and IP conflicts, leading to costly outages, compromising security posture and impacting time to market.
Infoblox, the leader in delivering critical network services, addresses these challenges with Universal Asset Insights, which provides a unified view of IP-based and non-IP-based assets. With an unmatched breadth of discovery sources, Universal Asset Insights automates asset discovery and analysis, and provides, contextualized and near– real-time visibility into on-premises assets as well as multi-cloud assets. Providing an infrastructure-wide central repository of assets, Universal Asset Insights improves visibility, operational efficiency and contextual awareness across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.