Integrated DDI: The Hidden Helper for Network Management Visibility

Technology provides a plethora of solutions to keep businesses innovating. But implementing these ideas into a successful IT transformation initiative involves making sure the basic IT infrastructure, on which this innovation is built, stays secure. This requires a modern network infrastructure as a foundational pillar and the implementation of a robust DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) solution. Such a foundation can be far more strategic than it immediately seems.

The hidden helper

The smart integration of what many regard as base-level network infrastructure technologies like DDI can help IT departments drive phenomenal visibility. The insights gathered can boost productivity and efficiency at the organizational level through improved network availability, security and performance.

Tech-savvy network or IT managers already know the technical advantages integrated DDI can bring to their organizations, but often the challenge is to convince a CIO whose focus is squarely on the bottom line. To help make the case for DDI, we’ve released our 2017 ROI survey report highlighting how organizations like yours can reduce the time and cost of managing, configuring and integrating small to extra-large enterprise networks, with a 7 to 11 months payback period.

In this three-part blog series, we will look at the economic benefits of having one single source of truth. Using hard numbers from customer case studies we aim to show that the ability to manage large and complex IP address spaces more easily, and make changes faster and with fewer errors, can pay off on both technical and economic levels. We kick off with a look at how this approach can help your organization achieve greater visibility.

Why visibility is critical

Whether you are a manufacturer, university or large retailer, managing IP addresses manually can quickly become a burden and take away a lot of time from IT resources. Worst case scenario, manual tasks will also lead to errors, the kind that could easily prevent users from accessing mission-critical services. To leverage your investments in the most efficient way, global visibility then becomes essential. Here is why:

• To gain greater control – having a clearer view of both your technology and IT spend will help you better manage your budget and resources.
• To anticipate serious issues like outages – proactive services monitoring, user-defined reports and network asset tracking can help reduce the time spent on conflict troubleshooting identification by 89%.
• For reliability and security – having visibility will ensure network reliability with error-free configurations, centralized management and best practices enforcement.

How EfficientIP delivers greater visibility

By deploying a smart DDI solution, your organization can help strengthen its network foundations and achieve greater visibility in three ways:

1. One single source of truth – by having DNS, DHCP and IPAM stored in the same database, customers who have switched from Infoblox or BlueCat to EfficientIP’s integrated DDI solution have spent five minutes instead of two hours on weekly audit and analysis to reclaim unused IP addresses and switch ports.
2. Simple reporting for rapid decision-taking – the reporting functionality is directly integrated within the graphical interface. This allows customers to save 87% of time generating weekly reports on DNS-DHCP server configurations.
3. Stronger design architecture and interface – by using industry-leading technology, our solution is more powerful and efficient than our competitors. For example, EfficientIP can store 4 million IP addresses in a central data repository, more than any other provider.