ENTERPRISE TECHNOLOGY
Networking platforms for
digital transformation
Domain Name Systems and network automation are key technologies
driving the transformation of networks according to senior executives
from Infoblox and Juniper Networks. By Arun Shankar.
F
or digital enterprises, the loss of
network access is no longer a minor
inconvenience. It can negatively
affect productivity, customer satisfaction,
brand, revenues, and profitability.
As the global directory of Internet
destinations, the Domain Name System
DNS, is essential to modern network
connectivity. Indeed, the availability of a
digitally connected business hinges on the
availability of DNS and its related services.
In the present day digital connected
world, end users can estimate the value of
having resilient DNS services. “If you are
a modern business today and your DNS
16
is down, and no one has access to any
applications, whether it is your employees
or your customers or your partners, the cost
can easily range into the millions of dollars,
very quickly from downtime. So, I think
we have done a good job of articulating
the value of the services we provide,” says
Jesper Andersen, CEO Infoblox.
Unfortunately, however, DNS is
as much a friend of the dark industry
as it is of digital organisations. It is
not unnoticed any longer, that DNS
has become a major attack vector is
cybersecurity. “Our job of course has been
to help our customers by securing DNS
as best we can. DNS is the highest attack
vector from a network protocol in today’s
world. And so, securing them has been
paramount for us,” says Andersen.
The first presence of malware inside a
network is a DNS query. Infoblox currently
plays a big role in that through its DNS
Firewall. The DNS Firewall allows you to
filter DNS queries, by feeding the DNS
server, a list of blacklisted web links. “We
talk of that as threat intelligence. The
content of that list matters a great deal.
And as you can appreciate, the actual
threat pattern of bad URLs changes every
single second and every minute of the day.
Issue 14
INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS