 From around the globe, it's theCUBE with digital coverage of next level network experience event brought to you by Infoblox. Okay, welcome back everyone. This is theCUBE's coverage of the next level networking experience virtual event with Infoblox. I'm John Furrier, host of theCUBE. We're here in our Palo Alto, California studios as part of our remote access during COVID, getting the interviews and the stories and sharing that with you. We got a great guest here, Venn Savage who's a network operations manager at Morgan School District in Utah, a customer of Infoblox to share his story. Venn, thanks for coming on. Hey, thanks for having me. First of all, the Red Sox hat, A-plus interview. I can tell you right now, it's going to go great. Go Sox, wish baseball was in season. Great to have you on. We'll get there. We'll get there. All my Yankee fans hate when I say that, but anyway, I miss baseball. But that brings up COVID-19, obviously baseball, season sports, life has been impacted. Your district, like many school districts around the world, we're told to shut down, send workers home. That meant sending kids home too. So you got the educators, you got the administration, and you got the kids all going home. What did you do to keep things going? Because it didn't stop. They had to do the remote learning and new things were emerging, new patterns, new traffic, new kinds of experience. What did you learn? What's going on? Well, first we tried to lock the doors and pretend we weren't there, but they found us. Real, I mean, real quickly in our school district, we're not a one-to-one operation. So that caused a big change for us. We had to quickly adapt and we chose to use Chromebooks because that's what we have for the students to use in their classes. So getting that squared away and sent out into the families was a big challenge. But then on top of that, being in the school district, we then had to decide, okay, how do we protect and filter, provide the filtering that the students are gonna need even though they're at home. So there's some relative safety there when they're online and accessing email and things like that. So those were probably our two biggest hurdles was ramping up the devices and then providing, making sure the network access from a filtering and consistency standpoint was going to work. You know, I got to ask you because obviously this kind of disruption, you don't read about this in the IT manual around disaster recovery and disruption to operations. But essentially the whole thing changes, but you still got to connect to the network DNS. You got to get the access to the content. You got content, you got systems, you got security, all to be managed while in flight of dealing with connection points that are remote. You got the disruption and the craziness of that. And then you've got this big IoT experiment, basically edge of the network, you know, in all over the place. You know, on one hand, you kind of geek out and say, wow, this is really kind of a challenge, it's opportunity to solve a problem. At the same time, you know, what do you do? So take us through that because that's a, it's a challenge of locking down the security in a borderless environment. People are everywhere, the students. Business has to get done. You got to resolve to the resources. So thankfully, we had migrated to Infoblox several years ago, and just this last, I wouldn't say in October, I finally got us on the cloud, the blocks one threat defense cloud portion of it too. So from a security standpoint, we already had a really good foundation in place from both the DNS aspect and the DNS security aspect. So that was, to be honest, most users, it was seamless transition in many regards. Most users didn't even realize they were being, you know, pushed through the Infoblox's cloud DNS server, you know, which was providing security and filtering. So that was a big plus for us because it was less man hours we had to spend, you know, troubleshooting people's DNS resolutions why sites wouldn't, you know, maybe they weren't being filtered correctly. All of that was, to be honest, perfect. Where other platforms we'd had previously were just a nightmare to manage. Like giving example of the old way versus the new way here. I mean, in manual, is it in files, configuration? What take us through? No, it was like a separate, it was a separate product content filter that works in conjunction with the firewall. And I'm not going to name the company's name. I don't want to, you know, even though it hasn't been many years. Yeah. But it seemed with that product, we were spending on average about three to four hours a day fixing false positives just from a filtering aspect because it would interfere with the DNS. And it didn't really do it. I mean, how it filters is not based on DNS totally, right? So by migrating to Infoblox, our DNS and the filtering, the security is all handling at the DNS level and it was just much more to be, I mean, frankly honest, it was much more invisible to the end user. So. More efficient, you decouple filtering from DNS resolution, got it. All right, this is the big topic I've been talking with Infoblox people on this program and this event is on how this new DDI layer, you know, DNS, DHCP and IP address management kind of all together super important. It's critical infrastructure. You know, this borderless enterprise, your borderless institution, the same thing. You get a school as a customer, how does the DDI layout this foundational security play for delivering this next level experience? What's your take on that? Well, for our, like for a school platform, we use it in a number of ways. Besides, I mean, the filtering is huge, but just for the ability, like for example, one of the components is response policy zones of DNS firewalls, what they call it. And it allows you one to manage traditional like DNS names or IP addresses. You can manage those by creating essentially a zone that is like a whitelist, a blacklist, a rewrite. So you've got a lot of control. And again, it's filtering at the DNS level. So it's looking based on DNS responses and queries. The other aspect of that is the feeds that you receive from Infoblox. So by subscribing to those, we have access to a lot of information that Infoblox and their partners have created, identifying, you know, bad actors, malware, attack vectors based on, again, DNS traffic, if you will. And so that takes a load off us, not having to worry and trying to do all that on our own. I mean, we've seen a lot of attacks minimized because of the feeds themselves. So that again frees us up. We are a very small school district in some regards. There's a, I am the only network person in the district and there's like a total of four of us that manage, you know, kind of the support aspect. And so being able to not have to spend time, you know, researching or tracking down, you know, breaches and attacks as much because of the DNS security, frees me up to do other things, you know, like in the more standard networking realm from a design and implementation aspect. Great, thanks for sharing that. I want to ask about security. Obviously, very competitive space, security here and everyone promising it. Different things that different security things you had to buy. I got to ask you, why did you guys decide to use Infoblox and what's the reason behind it? Well, to be frankly honest, I'm actually an Infobox trainer and I've been training for 15 years. So I kind of had an agenda when I first took this job to help out the school district. But in my experience, I've been doing working and networking for over 20 years. And in my experience, Infobox is one of the most easy and best managed DNS solutions that I've come across. So, you know, I might be a little biased, but I'm okay with that. And so I pushed us to be honest to get there. And then from the security aspect, as all that has evolved, it just makes, to me, it makes sense. Why not wrap the more things you can maybe wrap together. And so, you know, when you're talking about attacks, over 90% of attacks use DNS. So if I have a solution that is already providing my DNS and then wraps the security into it, it just makes the most sense for me. Yeah, I mean, it go back to Infobox's DNA. You got Cricket Liu, Stuart Bailey, the founder. I mean, this is, they didn't just wake up one day and decide to start up. These are practitioners. Early days of the internet, they know DNS cold. And DNS has been evolved. I mean, and when it needs the, when you get into the DNS hacks and then you realize, look, let's build an abstraction layer. You've seen internet navigation, discovery, all this stuff. DNS has been proven. It is a critical infrastructure. Well, and to be honest, it's one of those services that you can't filter the firewall, right? You have to have it. You have to, it's that foundation layer. And so it makes sense that attackers are leveraging it because the firewall has to let it through in and out. And so it's a natural, almost a natural path for them to break in. So having something that speaks, you know, native DNS as part of your security platform, makes more sense because it can understand and see those attacks, the more sophisticated they become as well. So I got to ask you, since you're very familiar with Infoblox and you're actually deploying it, it's a great solution. I think that this new DDI layer, which is an abstraction is always a great evolution. Take away complexity and more functionality. Clouds, certainly cloud natives everywhere. And that's what it fits for. What is the update? If I'm watching this, I'm like, you know, I've been running DNS and I know it's out there. It's been running everything. And I got to update my foundation of my business. I got to make my DNS rock solid. What's the new update? What's Infoblox doing now? I know they got DNS chops, seen that, done it. What's new about Infoblox? What do you say? Well, they have a couple of things they've been trying to modify over the last several years in my opinion. Making more DNS like a, you know, like software as a service, you know, service on demand type of approach, SAS. So you have the cloud components where you can take a lot of the heavy lifting maybe off of your network team's shoulders because it is, I think people would be surprised how many customers out there have teams that are managing the DNS and even the DHCP aspect that that's not really what their experience is. And then they don't, they don't have a true maybe background in DNS. And so having something that can help make that easier, it's almost, you know, I hate to maybe use this term it almost sounds like it's too simple, but it's almost like a plug and play approach for some environments, you know, you're able to pop that in. And a lot of probably the problems they've been dealing with and not realizing what the root cause was will be fixed. So that's always a huge component with Infoblox, but their security is really what's come about in the last several years. And back as a school district, you know, our besides securing traffic, which every customer has to do, we have a lot of laws and regulations around filtering with students and teachers. So anyone that's using a campus owned device. And so for us, I don't think people realize the maturity that the filtering aspect of the blocks one threat defense, how it's really evolved over the last couple of years. It's become a really, really good product. And like I said earlier, it just works seamlessly with the DNS security pieces. So it's getting DNS, you want to unpack everything, you go right to the root level, DNS is it. So I got to ask you, how is Infoblox helping you keep network services running and system secure? Well, I think we're more on just the DNS, it does our DNS and DHCP. So from that standpoint, you know, in the five years almost we've been running that aspect, we have had very little, if maybe one or two incidents of problems with, you know, from a DNS DHCP. So our users are able to connect, you know, when they turn on their computer to them, the internet's up, you know, there's no bumps in the road stopping them from being able to connect. So that's a huge thing, you know, you don't have to deal with those constant issues. Again, as a small team, that just takes time away from the big projects you're trying to accomplish. And then two, being able to now combine these security filtering solution that alone has probably saved us. I'll probably, you know, upwards of 500 man hours in the last eight months to where normally we would be, you know, spending those hours. Again, troubleshooting issues that false positives, things like that. And as a small team, that just, you know, sucks the life out of you when you have to, you know, always spend time on that. I mean, you're always chasing your tails. Almost you want to be productive. Automation plays a key role in that. Right. Yeah. So I got to ask you, you know, just a general question, I'm curious, you know, one of the things I see is, you know, sprawling of devices, Wi-Fi was a great example that put an access point up. You got a rogue access point. So, you know, as you get more connections, you know, DHCP was amazing. Oh my God, this is awesome. But also you had also DHCP problem, right? You had to, this IP management is not just around slinging more DHCP around. So, you know, you got, the trend is more connections on the IP side. How does Infoblox make that easier? Because, you know, for the people who may not know the DNS, INS analysis and DHCP and IP address management, they're all kind of tied together, right? So, this is the magic of DDI in my opinion. I want to get your thoughts on how you see that evolving. Yeah, and I think that's another kind of back twice. It's kind of almost like a plug-and-play for a lot of customer environments. You're getting, you know, you're getting the DHCP DNS and IPAM all wrapped in one. So you have this product that speaks all those languages, if you will. And that, and along with some of the reporting services and things of that nature. When I look for like a MAC address in my Infoblox database, I'm not just going to get a MAC address and what the IP address is. I'm not just going to get the DNS, like the host name, maybe, you know, the FQDN, the fully qualified domain name either. I have the ability to bring in all this information that one, the client is communicating with the DHCP DNS server. On top of things like metadata that you can configure in the database to help really color in the picture of your network. So when you're looking at what device is using this IP, when we talk about rogue devices or things like that, I can get so much more information out of Infoblox that almost to the point where you're almost being able to nail down the location of where the device is at, even if it's a wireless client, because it works in conjunction with some of our wireless deployments too. So within, you know, a matter of minutes, we have almost all the information we would need to take whatever action is appropriate for something like that. That again, used to take us hours and hours to maybe troubleshoot it. You can appreciate a lot of the other interviews I've done with the Infoblox folks. One of the things that's came out of them is the trailing. You can see the trail. They got to get in somewhere. DNS is like the footprints are there. You got to, and that's the traffic. And that's been helping on potential attacks. I mean, DDoS is, for example, everyone knows what that is, but DNS is like you said, and a lot of the surface areas DNS is where the hackers are. Makes it easier to find things. Well, and then, you know, by integrating with the cloud, I've got, you know, that the cloud-based with the Blocks One, it added advanced DNS security which helps protect against DDoS as well as any cast to help provide more availability because I'm pushing all my DNS traffic through those cloud servers. It's like I'm almost the equivalent of a very large organization that would normally spend millions and millions of dollars trying to do this on their own. So I'm getting the benefits and kind of the equivalent from that cloud hybrid approach that normally we would never have the resources to implement on our own. Well, then I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy day and to remote into theCUBE studios. Talk about next level networking experience. So I want to just ask you just, you know, put your, you know, experience hat on. You've been, you've seen some waves. You've seen the technology evolve. When you hear next level networking and when you hear next level networking experience, almost two separate meanings, but next level networking means next level. Next level networking experience means there's some experience behind it. What are those two phrases mean to you? Next level networking and next level networking experience? Well, I think, to me, I always look at it as the evolution of being able to have a user experience that's consistent no matter where you're located, whether you're home or in your office and especially within today's environment. We have to be able to provide that consistent experience, but I think where a lot of people may not think about or might overlook if you're just a, you know, more of an end user is along with that experience, it has to be a consistent security approach. So if I'm an end user, I should be able to have the access, the, and the security, which, you know, filtering all that fun stuff to not just allow me the connectivity, but to bring me, you know, that to keep me secure wherever I'm at. And I think schools, you know, obviously with COVID and the one to one that everyone was forced to do, but I think businesses in general, I think that's, you know, years ago, Cisco, when I worked with Cisco, we talked about, you know, the remote user, the mobile user and how Cisco was kind of leading the way on that. And I think, you know, with the nature of things like this pandemic, I think being able to have your users again have that consistent experience, no matter where they're at is going to be key. And so that's how I see, when I think of the network evolution, I think that's how it has to go. Well, I appreciate your time sharing your insights. You know, a lot of people are learning that, you know, you got to pour the concrete to build the building, you know, DNS is becoming that kind of critical infrastructure. But final question for you, why got you here? You know, how are you doing? Obviously schools looks like they're going to have some either fully virtual for the next semester or some sort of timed or set schedule. There's all kinds of different approaches. At the end of the day, it still is this big IoT experiment from a traffic standpoint. So, you know, new expectations create new solutions. What do you see on the horizon? What challenges do you see as you ride this way? Because you got to hold down the fourth day at school district for 3,000 students and you got the administration and the faculty. So, you know, what are you expecting and what do you hope to see evolve or what do you want to stay away from? What's your opinion? But I think my biggest concern is, you know, making sure our students and staff don't, you know, run into trouble. And I say that more from, you know, by being exposed to attacks, you know, their data, which ultimately comes back to our data as a district, but you know, the student data, I think, you know, with anything, kids are very vulnerable targets for many reasons. You know, they're quick to use technology, they're quick to use like social media, things like that. But they are probably the first ones who security does not, you know, cross their mind. So, I think my big concern is as we're moving this, you know, a hybrid approach where kids can be in school or they're going to be at home, maybe they'll change throughout the days of the week. It'll fluctuate, keeping them secure, you know, protecting them from themselves, maybe in a way. If I have to be the guy who's kind of the grumpy old dad looked at, I'm okay with wearing that hat, but I think that's my biggest concern is, you know, providing that type of stability and security so parents at the end of the day can be, you know, have more peace of mind that their kids, you know, are online even more. Yeah, it's great that you can bring that experience because, you know, new environments, like whether it's zooming or using, trying to get the different software tools that are out there that were built for, you know, on-premises, you have now potentially a click here, a click there, they could be a target. So, you know, being safe and getting the job done too, making sure they have uptime. So the remote access, I mean, again, you've got a new edge now, right? So the edge of the network is the home. Exactly, yeah. Your service area just got bigger. Yeah, yeah, we're in, you know, I mean, everybody's guessed whether they like it or not. Man, I appreciate your time and good luck and let's stay in touch. Thanks for your time. Hey, thanks for having me. You guys have a good rest of your week and day too, stay safe. Thank you very much. Just a cubes coverage with info blocks for a special next level networking experience, pop-up event, I'm John Furrier with theCUBE, your host, thanks for watching.