Unveiling Network Clarity: The Brilliance of Infoblox Universal Asset Insights

Do you need help controlling critical network services in today's incredibly challenging IT environment? That pressure is even greater for those who are pursuing cloud-native solutions. The fragmented approach of critical network service management in hybrid and multi-cloud environments, partner networks, and devices leads to increased operational inefficiencies and exposure to security risks.

Especially with how things are developing now, operating a network requires understanding the structure of your network topology to be sustainable. Organizations without a complete list of assets to track are at risk for security breaches, network management inefficiencies and additional time spent on troubleshooting activities. Imagine trying to fix a network issue, not knowing which device was causing it, or finding out too late that the security breach occurred due to an unknown or a non-compliant device connected to the network. Having a centralized view of assets can significantly improve the effectiveness and security of any organization's network, helping to know what is on the network at any given time, understand what is happening and who is responsible for each asset type.

The Challenges of Incomplete Asset Visibility

Organizations often face the common challenge of incomplete asset discovery, as many rely on manual processes such as tracking assets in spreadsheets, periodical manual scanning of networks that result in outdated or inaccurate inventories. This lack of comprehensive asset information makes it difficult to maintain an accurate view of all devices connected to the network. Thus, networks become poorly defined, making it challenging to identify inefficiencies and potential security risks within the network infrastructure.

Ineffective critical network services management is another significant issue for enterprise networks, which is also associated with the absence of asset visibility. Without detailed information about network assets, organizations struggle to manage their networks efficiently, leading to resource wastage, difficulty in capacity planning, compliance and governance challenges, and prolonged downtimes during troubleshooting and maintenance. Moreover, the absence of accurate asset data can hinder the IT team's ability to optimize network performance and make informed decisions.

Unmanaged, forgotten, and non-compliant devices within the network exacerbate security vulnerabilities. These devices pose significant security risks because they can be used as entry points for cyberattacks. Without comprehensive asset discovery and monitoring, it becomes difficult to detect and mitigate these risks, leaving the network susceptible to potential breaches and non-compliance with industry standards.

How Infoblox Universal Asset Insights™ can solve these challenges

We are pleased to introduce Infoblox Universal Asset Insights™, a powerful new product within the Infoblox Universal DDI™ suite that automates the discovery and analysis of assets across major public clouds, on-premises networks, and IoT/OT devices providing detailed and near-real-time visibility into network assets, unmatched in the industry.

Universal Asset Insights automatically discovers all network assets, providing a detailed and precise understanding of your entire infrastructure, including both physical and virtual components. This ensures that all assets are included and generates a comprehensive network view. With a clear understanding of asset relationships and dependencies, critical network services management becomes significantly more efficient, allowing IT teams to:

Automate Discovery

With Infoblox Universal Asset Insights, you can effortlessly automate the discovery process, ensuring a complete and accurate inventory of all devices connected to your hybrid multi-cloud network. This automated discovery provides unparalleled visibility and ensures that your asset database is always updated. Best of all, it's designed to be user-friendly, making it easy for your team to manage your network assets

• Clear, Unmatched Visibility: The automated discovery process is designed to capture every type of device, ranging from traditional servers and workstations to modern IoT and OT devices. This ensures that no asset goes unnoticed or overlooked.
• Near-to Real-Time Updates: Universal Asset Insights seamlessly updates the inventory as new devices join or leave the network, ensuring your asset database remains current without any manual intervention.
• Minimizing Manual Effort: Eliminates the need for manual asset tracking, reduces human error, and frees up the IT Network Team to focus on more strategic tasks.
• Comprehensive Inventory: Includes details on device types, configurations, and network interactions, providing a thorough understanding of the network landscape.

With the new Assets workspace, users are equipped with monitors that deliver real-time visualizations of critical metric summaries. This allows users, particularly network and security professionals, to quickly assess the health of their networking and security environments. The monitors can identify zombie assets by confidence level, unregistered assets with missing records, and non-compliant assets, enabling teams to find and act on potential issues or vulnerabilities.

Improve Critical Network Services Management

With detailed information about each network asset, Universal Asset Insights streamlines critical network services management and offers a clear, comprehensive view of your hybrid multi-cloud network. This capability enables organizations to quickly identify and resolve any potential threats, list zombie assets, enhance overall network performance and service availability, reduce downtime, and improve operational efficiency.

• Proactive Management: Allows for proactive identification of efficient IP utilization, configuration details, and domain resolution times.
• Resource Optimization: Enhances efficiency by streamlining network operations, listing address block allocations, and reducing manual interventions.
• Easier Network Planning: Facilitates network analysis and optimization by providing clear insights into the existing network structure and its performance.
• Discovery and Remediation of Zombie Assets: Automatically identifies and helps remediate inactive or zombie assets, including unused virtual machines, detached storage volumes, idle load balancers and unused public IP addresses-optimizing network resources and reducing security risks.

Cloud Visibility

Infoblox Universal Asset Insights offers unparalleled cloud visibility, a critical benefit for modern organizations operating in multi-cloud environments. With the ability to automatically discover and monitor assets across major public cloud providers like Azure, AWS, and GCP, Universal Asset Insights ensures comprehensive visibility into cloud resources. This capability allows IT teams to gain a unified view of their cloud infrastructure, making tracking and managing cloud-based assets easier. Enhanced cloud visibility helps identify underutilized resources, such as zombie assets, ensuring optimal allocation. And furthermore, by providing near real-time updates and detailed insights into cloud asset configurations and interactions, Universal Asset Insights enables better decision-making and proactive management, ultimately enhancing the performance, security, and efficiency of cloud operations.

Improved Security Posture

Universal Asset Insights is instrumental in enhancing organizational security by carefully identifying and categorizing all network devices, including unmanaged and non-compliant ones. Comprehensive visibility is critical to reducing security risks from unauthorized devices or devices not complying with corporate policies. By pinpointing these devices, Universal Asset Insights empowers IT teams to swiftly implement remediation actions, ensuring a robust security posture across the network infrastructure. Moreover, this proactive approach enhances threat detection capabilities and strengthens compliance with industry standards and regulatory requirements. As a result, organizations can effectively safeguard their network environments, preemptively addressing vulnerabilities before they escalate into significant security incidents.

An example of the dashboard listing Zombie Assets details.

Conclusion

Imagine the ease of having a unified view of all your network assets, improving both performance and security, and no more guessing games about what's on your network or who is responsible for various asset types. With Universal Asset Insights, you gain clarity, efficiency, and peace of mind.

Universal Asset Insights stands out in the market with its comprehensive and integrated asset discovery and management approach. Unlike other products that focus on specific domains or use cases, Universal Asset Insights covers a wide range of discovery sources, including on-premises networks, private and public clouds, IoT devices, and OT environments. This makes it the first solution to combine such extensive capabilities in one package.

When paired with other cutting-edge Infoblox solutions like Universal DDI Management, which allows you to manage DDI assets across multiple platforms from a single control plane, and NIOS-X as a Service, which enables DNS and DHCP services without the need for deploying infrastructure, Universal Asset Insights and the Infoblox Portal become your single source of truth for DDI across the entire network.

Learn More

Ready to revolutionize hybrid, multi-cloud networking and security? Don't miss our Universal DDI 3-Part Webinar Series with our esteemed Chief Evangelist, Cricket Liu! Discover how to tackle the complexities of managing critical network services in hybrid and multi-cloud environments. Each session, led by our expert, offers invaluable insights and practical solutions to streamline operations, enhance visibility, and optimize costs.

Register now:

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And that's not all! Join us at Infoblox Exchange 2024 to discover game-changing innovations that empower you to tame complexity, eliminate silos, stop threats earlier, and scale elastically across cloud and on-premises infrastructure. In 14 cities across the globe, Exchange 2024 will unveil groundbreaking solutions that enable you to synchronize vital network functionality across all clouds, protect proactively with DNS-layer defenses, and bring networking and security together as never before to get critical insights faster and deploy apps sooner.

Don't miss out on these opportunities to enhance your knowledge and network with industry experts.

Also, stay tuned for more insightful blogs coming your way soon at Infoblox.com.

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