By Charles F. Moreira
The scope of today’s enterprise networks has gone way beyond the well confined and controlled boundaries of the corporation with its own servers in-house, desktop office PCs, wired local area networks (LANs) on-premises, interconnected by wired leased lines or secured virtual private networks of about 10 or more years ago.
With trend for employees to use their own portable devices such as notebook PCs, tablets, smartphones for their work, conducted any-time, anywhere from public WiFi hotspots; exposes not only their device but their whole enterprise network to malware infection, much like a sexually promiscuous person who hops into bed with a new partner every other night is at high risk of contracting a sexually-transmitted disease and of infecting others.
However, while the sexually promiscuous person can rein themselves in and stick to one known partner, thus greatly reduce their exposure; competitive and economic imperatives compel greater promiscuity of exposure of enterprise networks to personal devices and strange, often poorly secured WiFi hotspots beyond the direct control of the enterprise’s information services department.
Then the shift to cloud computing, with its greater exposure to attack via the Internet, coupled with virtual machines which can be created in one data centre, moved to another in a different country and made to vanish somewhere else; makes it difficult for network security systems to track and manage them.
Moreover, if today’s 32-bit IPv4 (Internet Protocol version 4) scheme with its close to 4.3 billion possible IP addresses is not enough of a challenge for Internet security systems, the new 128-bits IPv6 scheme with its 34,028,236,692, 093,846,346,3374,607,431,768,211,456 (over 34 billion billion billion) possible addresses and greater complexity, poses even greater challenges for network security systems to handle.
The Infoblox solution
On March 27, automated network control and security management company, the Santa Clara, California-based Infoblox Inc. and its regional representative, the Singapore-based Transition Systems, introduced three new enterprise network security solutions to Malaysia – i.e. The Infoblox DNS Firewall software, the Infoblox Security Device Controller and the Infoblox Trinzic 100 Network Edge Services Appliance.
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| Kevin Dickson, Infoblox vice president of Product Management |
The Domain Name System (DNS) is the “phonebook of the Internet,” listing human-intelligible IP addresses such as www.enterpriseitnews.com.my mapped to a string of numbers.
Regular firewalls don’t detect DNS (Domain Name System) traffic, so if a piece of malware manages to get behind the firewall, it can exploit the DNS as a pathway to connect to a malicious destination or botnet controller and this cannot be detected by legacy approaches.
DNS Firewall
The Infoblox DNS Firewall is an add-on option to the Infoblox DDI (DNS, DHCP and IPAM) solution, which is designed to block outgoing traffic to known malicious sites or sites with a bad reputation.
It receives a feed from a company called Threatstop which contains the latest information on the reputation of IP (Internet Protocol) addresses and MAC (media access control) addresses. Threatstop works with organisations worldwide to ensure that its feeds are relevant worldwide.
The Infoblox DNS Firewall is configurable, so users can create blacklists and whitelists of IP addresses to minimise false positives.
Infoblox DDI’s IP Address Management (IPAM) function helps with migration from IPv4 to IPv6.
Security Device Controller
Many enterprise IT systems have multiple firewalls and security devices from multiple vendors and network security teams often have to struggle to keep pace with having to frequently update them all with a large number of changes, which is not only time consuming but often is done manually.
The Infoblox Security Device Controller automates all this. It talks to multiple firewalls and security devices from multiple vendors and automatically update them all with the latest information on malware, malicious sites, rules, policies, logs, etc. in simple, human-intelligible terms.
It thus greatly saves organisations time, eliminates configuration errors, helps organisations with tracking and to comply with requirements, while it frees up security teams from humdrum chores so they can spend more time on analysis, staging and testing activities.
Trinzic 100
IP enabled devices are increasingly being deployed at multiple locations at the enterprise network edge, such as retail stores, hospitals, schools, hotels, restaurants, cafés, etc., which are a challenge for the organisation’s information system teams to manage. Moreover, legacy branch networking gear are unable to reconnect the branch network to the enterprise server of the central network goes down.
The Infoblox Trinzic 100 Network Edge Services Appliance is a relatively low-cost, easily deployed, self-contained box which reliably manages and controls branch office equipment without requiring specialised hardware or technical expertise.
It employs Infoblox Grid technology, which links appliances together across a distributed enterprise, which lets the Trinzic 100 provide centralised control, high availability and easy maintenance. All configurations or changes can be made once from a centralised location and applied to all edge devices, including those in branch offices and remote locations.
This centralised management also lets organisations to scale their network into the thousands without having to require technical expertise at each location.
“As more initiatives such as automation and mobility take hold, you’ll need tighter control and greater visibility into network operations,” said Andre Kindness, principal analyst in a Forrester Research report. “The network manager’s role must evolve to take control of network management issues around optimisation of new and existing systems, configuration management, life-cycle management and ITIL.”
ITIL or Information Technology Infrastructure Library is a set of IT service management practices focused on aligning IT services with the needs of business.
“The new offerings from Infoblox let us alleviate the most pressing IT challenges faced by our clients due to the pervasiveness of the BYOD (bring your own device) trend, private cloud, IPv6 and more,” said Jonathan Juay, group managing director, Transition Systems Asia. “Infoblox also helps us grow our business by supporting us with tools to deliver new value-added services to our clients.”
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| Jennifer Teh, Transition Systems Malaysia country manager |
Infoblox has been marketed through Transition Systems for the past 7 years, which has sold hundreds of appliances to banks, financial services companies, telecommunication service providers, manufacturers and government. Founded in Singapore in 1999, Transition now has a presence across the ASEAN region, India, Australia and New Zealand.
Infoblox product and solutions prices start at the equivalent of US3,000 and rise up to US$200,000.
