As the physical borders of the world close under COVID-19 restrictions, the boundaries of the networked world are opening up to infinity. With the workplace an increasingly mobile location, borderless enterprise is on the rise.

“Borderless means that I don’t have people sitting in an office anymore, and if I do have people sitting in an office, they have the similar experience to people that are connecting remotely, no matter where they are,” said Glenn Sullivan (pictured), principal product manager at Infoblox Inc.

Sullivan spoke with John Furrier, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during the Infoblox Next Level Network Experience event. They discussed next-level networking and the importance of security in a borderless environment. (* Disclosure below.)

Network moves to the cloud, and security jumps to the next-level

A lot has changed in the year since Sullivan first spoke to theCUBE about the virtualization of network. SnapRoute Inc., the company he co-founded, was acquired by secure cloud-managed network services provider Infoblox, and Sullivan stayed on to oversee emerging technologies innovation. Then, COVID-19 shut down business as usual and forced companies to adopt hybrid-cloud strategies fast, or risk closure for good.

Enter the next-level networking experience. “You don’t really want to put everything in the cloud. You don’t really want to have everything happen on-premises. You want to do the right data processing where it’s needed,” Sullivan stated. “It’s really about elastic scale … being able to run whatever you need to run service-wise as close to the delivery mechanism of either the user or as close to the app in the cloud as you need to.”

As businesses adopt cloud technology, the edges of the network dissolve to create a borderless attack surface, according to Sullivan. “The edges of your network don’t match edges of your walls in your [brick and mortar] branches,” he said. This destroys an organization’s ability to define a bounded secured area.

“It’s not just about adding more firewalls. It’s not just about adding more network perimeter security. It’s really about how do I apply foundational security across the board,” he stated.

In a “cattle versus pets “situation for networking, the physical box on-prem has to move to a software-as-a-service model that can handle the hybrid environment, Sullivan explained.

DDI in the cloud native world

DHCP, DNS and IPAM are collectively referred to as DDI, and together they form the foundational layer of a network. They have been around since the dawn of the internet and remain critical as it expands out into the internet of things.

“DHCP is a networking service, DNS is a networking service, IPAM is a networking service, so you should be able to spin those up wherever you need to and manage those without having to worry about it all being tied to specific things that you have to manage in a very nurtured way,” Sullivan said. “They sound like they’re plain vanilla protocol suites until you really start applying borderless security across the board with them.”

InfoBlox’s BloxOne platform takes DDI into the cloud native world, offering networking as managed services that free engineers from the impossible task of building and managing connections between the thousands of connected devices.

“As we add more and more devices, more and more endpoints, more and more users to manage, we have to make sure that we abstract away the complexity of all the connections that need to be built between those users and whatever abstraction orchestration layer that we utilize,” Sullivan stated. “I’m a network engineer at heart, so I always think about the path of a packet from the start to the end. DDI happens really early in the process, so if you get that right, the rest of the security infrastructure built on top of that is just going to work that much better.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the Infoblox Next Level Network Experience event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the Infoblox Next Level Network Experience event. Neither Infoblox Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE