AHEAD OF THE CURVE

INFOBLOX CEO, JESPER ANDERSEN, TALKS ABOUT HOW THE COMPANY IS TACKLING THE THREAT LANDSCAPE WITH CLOUD-MANAGED DDI AND NETWORK SECURITY SERVICES.

How has Covid-19 affected your business?

I would answer that question in two ways. First, there’s the impact on the people side of the business - the culture, the employees. That has been a little tough. Not just on Infoblox but the industry in general. We call it the

Great Resignation. Everyone in high tech is experiencing higher attrition than usual.

And a part of that is because many people we hired in the last two years have never really met another Infoblox person face to face; so they don’t have quite the same feeling for the company. But that is on the employee side.

On the business side, it’s been super positive for us as this move to work from home has been good for us. I can give you a good example of one of the largest professional services companies in the world. They had to figure out how 300,000 employees could work from home in a secure way, literally overnight, when the pandemic hit. We are critical in that mix. We are rapidly becoming a half a billiondollar company. We’re growing at over 20%, and I’m very proud that we are approaching 1800 employees.

Are you investing in more resources in the region?

We have been hiring a lot of people here over the last couple of years to make sure we have the right coverage across the Gulf countries and Africa. We have hired a much bigger team in Saudi Arabia. So I am always looking to add more people where there’s demand.

Do you have a cloud-first approach now?

When I came to Infoblox seven and a half years ago, my vision was that just like compute, and storage had moved to a cloud-managed world, the same thing would happen in networking. That was one of the reasons why I left Cisco because I just didn’t see them having the ability to do that. Around six years ago, we started building our cloud-managed platform, which we call BloxOne. First, we launched BloxOne Threat Defense, and a couple of years ago, BloxOne DDI, the industry’s first and true cloud-managed DDI solution. It means that controller’s single pane of glass management is in the cloud, and you can deploy DNS and DHCP in containers, wherever you want

– at a remote branch level, in your data centre, or even on your laptop. Most of our customers still run an on-prem, traditional NIOS (network identity operating system), and we have worked very hard to extend that NIOS solution into the public cloud. As companies extended their corporate networks into the cloud, we needed to ensure they maintain the same great visibility and control over their DNS and DHCP services.

What is the advantage of moving the management pane to the cloud?

You’d want to move to a cloud world because it is the cheaper total cost of ownership, and it is easy to manage. In the old days, when we created a new version of NIOS, we used to either send our customers physical appliances or a CD or DVD. Or they just downloaded it via our support site. The upgrades to NIOS have always been our strength. But companies always have to be careful about upgrades because of the missioncritical nature of DNS and DHCP. If you are a big bank, you’d want to schedule that upgrade over a weekend or a holiday. But in a cloud-first world, there is no need for that. We manage it all. We are rolling out new features and capabilities, and for the customer, it is just a browser refresh. That is a lower cost of ownership, and you get new features much more frequently.

If you are a heavily regulated big bank, you are often three or four versions behind our newest version in the NIOS world. That is not because of us, but because of your ability as a customer to manage your infrastructure and upgrades. That’s why ultimately cloud is a huge advantage. If you think about proxy servers, it used to be Bluecoat Networks or Websense. They had an appliance-centric model. Today, it’s Zscaler, and they’re just a cloud solution.

What is the idea behind Infoblox 3.0?

Infoblox 3.0 is my term for the transformation that Infoblox has been going through. It is a very different ball game when you transform from a company that primarily sold NIOS appliances on a perpetual license model to a new world where you sell cloud services on a subscription basis. Here you are managed by different type of financial metrics. Of course, we have a P&L, but the metric that the financial markets value us as a company is based on our annual recurring revenue and gross and net retention. And in a SAS world, you have things like customer success managers that are very different from your traditional support model. Infoblox 3.0 is the transformation from Infoblox 1.0 through 2.0 and into this new world where we are a modern cloud-managed SAS company.

Is DNS security critical to the overall security posture?

I think it’s critical. In today’s modern enterprises, the approach they take is a defense in depth strategy. Companies realise that they can’t buy all the security solutions from one vendor. You need firewalls and perimeter defense from someone. You want your cloud-managed security solutions from someone else. You want your threat intelligence to be a collaboration across different domains. There’s a big difference between applicationlevel security and infrastructure-level security. So a defense in depth strategy says that I will use point vendors for what they are best at. Now, we are the best at DNS security. Large enterprises are very focused on getting all of their security solutions to work well together. And it does me no good if I have dozens of point solutions that don’t talk to each other. This is why solutions like security orchestration and SIEM solutions, where you integrate data from different products, have become so important.

Our job at Infoblox is to make sure our solutions integrate as best as possible with other solutions. We have a lot of pre-built integrations with what we call the security ecosystem because the information we manage is so critical for other solutions. For example, when we see a query to a malicious website, we shouldn’t just keep that information and block that to ourselves. We know the IP address that made that query. We should tell the endpoint protection software that this IP address may be at risk. We should make sure the SIEM systems have not just the raw information from log files we have but correlated information. That’s why we built a lot of different integrations with other systems.

IF YOU ARE A BIG BANK, YOU’D WANT TO SCHEDULE THAT UPGRADE OVER A WEEKEND OR A HOLIDAY. BUT IN A CLOUD-FIRST WORLD, THERE IS NO UPGRADE. WE MANAGE IT ALL. WE ARE ROLLING OUT NEW FEATURES AND CAPABILITIES, AND FOR THE CUSTOMER, IT IS JUST A BROWSER REFRESH. THAT IS A LOWER COST OF OWNERSHIP, AND YOU GET NEW FEATURES MUCH MORE FREQUENTLY.