How Infoblox Powers the ATC

As a leading technology solution provider, we consider our Advanced Technology Center (ATC) to be essential in delivering a best-in-class customer experience. The ATC hosts customer engagements, solution showcases and long-term lab setups for many of our partners and customers. It spans five physical data centers in St. Louis and one remote location in Ashburn, Virginia. As the ATC grew, we noticed it was becoming increasingly complex to manage from a networking and security standpoint. Manual IP address allocation and management was time-consuming and error-prone, often taking over two hours and more than 10 steps to provision IP address space for a single lab environment. This inefficiency limited the ATC's ability to quickly respond to customer needs and scale operations effectively. Moreover, we lacked visibility into potential DNS threats targeting our networks.

The ATC is truly unique in terms of the depth and scale of what we can do, and Infoblox is a key part of making that happen. The ability to automate and scale with Infoblox APIs has been invaluable, enabling us to focus on delivering cutting-edge solutions for our partners and customers.

Infoblox DDI, BloxOne Threat Defense and Advanced DNS Protection bring automation, scalability and security

To address these challenges, we leveraged our existing relationship with Infoblox to deploy their complete infrastructure solutions (DNS, DHCP and IPAM) including security into our ATC. We re-architected our Infoblox Grid to take advantage of high-availability features and distributed grid members across the ATC's data centers. This transformative approach laid the foundation for a more resilient and adaptable network infrastructure, from which both the ATC and our customers can benefit.

We also developed an "IP Management Tool," a self-service web portal that automates the process of allocating and deprovisioning IP address space for lab environments. Leveraging Infoblox's APIs, this tool reduced the time and effort to provision networks from over two hours to just a few minutes. This gave our lab users an additional level of ownership of their environments. Lab users simply select their desired location, subnet size, and a name, and the tool automatically allocates a clean block of IP address space from the appropriate Infoblox network container and updates the grid. Deprovisioning is also fully automated through integration with our ServiceNow ticketing platform.

Furthermore, we implemented Infoblox Advanced DNS Protection (ADP) to secure both internal and external DNS from volumetric attacks like DDoS. By leveraging ADP's intelligent attack detection and mitigation capabilities, the ATC is able to maintain production level-requirements of DNS services. 

In addition, to protect the network and data from threats such as ransomware, phishing, DGAs, lookalike and suspicious domains, we deployed BloxOne Threat Defense. By using unique DNS-based threat intelligence, we are able to block threats early and prevent security incidents.

Over a million IP addresses automated, DNS secured and threats thwarted

With the Infoblox-powered IP Management Tool, we have dramatically reduced the time required to provision IP address space for customer labs from over two hours to just a few minutes. The tool has automated management of over 1 million allocated IP addresses across more than 25,000 Virtual Machines (VMs). This automation has streamlined lab operations and empowered the ATC to take on more complex projects without compromising quality or performance.

By deploying Infoblox ADP and BloxOne Threat Defense, we have gained critical visibility into threats targeting the ATC. This enhanced visibility has enabled the ATC to proactively detect and mitigate DDoS attacks, ransomware, and phishing, ensuring the integrity, security and reliability of our lab environments. 

The successful implementation of Infoblox DDI, BloxOne Threat Defense and ADP in our Advanced Technology Center demonstrates the transformative power of Infoblox critical networking solutions in today's complex IT environments. By embracing automation, a scale-out mentality, and advanced security measures, we have optimized our lab operations and reinforced our position as a leader in technology innovation and customer success. Using Infoblox's portfolio of solutions, organizations can achieve unparalleled network efficiency, security, and reliability, enabling them to focus on driving innovation and business success.