Domain Name System is one of the core concepts of networking. Referred to as the “phonebook of the internet,” it is the tool that translates domain names to numerical internet protocol addresses.

It is also part of the core networking technology collectively known as DDI: DNS, dynamic host configuration protocol, and internet protocol address management. Now, as the internet of things explodes the number of connected devices and expands the network edge to infinity, DDI is also moving to the next level.

“We are firm believers that the future of networking and security in IT is going to shift to a cloud-managed, cloud-native paradigm,” said Kanaiya Vasani (pictured), executive vice president of products and corporate development at Infoblox Inc. “So, if you have a thousand different edge locations, you can decide through a centralized policy framework what services you want to spin up at each of these thousand locations.”

Vasani 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 how Infoblox is reinventing internet protocol-based network communications for the hybrid cloud and borderless enterprise. (* Disclosure below.)

[Editor’s note: The following content has been condensed for clarity]

What’s the difference in your mind between on-premises and cloud-managed DDI and why does it matter?

Vasani: In the traditional world, all the information-technology infrastructure was sitting in one or more regional or centralized data centers, and it was easy to manage it. You could buy appliances from Infoblox, and you had folks sitting in these data centers and they could manage the entire infrastructure using some on-premise management tools.

But now think about if you’re a large company and you have 12,500 stores or offices. If you want to push DNS, DHCP, IP address management software to all these 12,500 locations, it is difficult to do that by deploying individual appliances or by deploying shrink-wrapped software.

But if I could take all the management and all the policy framework and pull that up into a software-as-a-service cloud that you can access from anywhere on the planet and leave protocol-serving engines on-premise. Then you have a container that gets spun up that can sit on any third-party hardware that’s in your infrastructure, but it is all managed through the cloud; it’s zero-touch provision and completely orchestrated. Now you are sitting in a central dashboard; or if you are in a COVID environment, you’re sitting at home and just accessing our SaaS service and managing your entire infrastructure from your couch at your home. So, it just becomes so much easier for IT administrators to operate and run such a network.

What does Infoblox provide, specifically, to create that next-level user experience?

Vasani: Today you would have to buy a box from Infoblox or any one of the networking guys out there. And you would have to deploy that and most likely end up over-provisioning each site because you don’t want to run out of capacity. The next-level experience would say, look, just tell me what sites you want deployed. The sites will call home, they will download the number of services needed based on some centralized policy that was defined, and you will get a right-sized deployment of services at that particular site.

This whole thing becomes a very dynamic experience in terms of how services get spun up, they get turned down, and it’s all driven by this whole notion of the users that are sitting at a location, the context of the user.

Can you give an example of a customer that illustrates next-level networking?

Vasani: We have 6,000-plus active customers. We have over 50% share when it comes to this DNS, DHCP, IPAM market. We are deployed in 95 out of the Fortune 100 enterprises. So Infoblox is someone you will see in any customer that you go through.

Typically, what happens is we would go in as the DDI layer for them to control and manage their IP address space and their DNS in the infrastructure. Then they say, ‘Through DHCP and IPAM, I know everything that is sitting in my infrastructure, and through DNS I have full visibility into all the communication happening from that end point. So that’s a great data source for me to leverage as a first layer of defense from a security standpoint.’

So, then they start to bring security into the mix in terms of how they leverage our product. And then to our SaaS platforms and SaaS offerings, they take that as they are driving this edge transformation.

The BloxOne DDI platform is our SaaS platform, and BloxOne base applications are our new offerings that integrate very nicely with some of our traditional offerings. So you get a very comprehensive, single pane of glass in terms of how you can manage your entire enterprise footprint, whether it’s on-prem, at the edge, in the public cloud, or at the cloud edge.

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