Summary

Under pressure from increasing business and security uncertainty, and little time to plan and take the necessary action required, our customer recognized that they needed help to accelerate the planning and implementation required to modernize their DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (IP Address Management) services. The other major concern was they needed to improve their security posture and did not have sufficient staff available. The scale and complexity of the DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) environment necessitated an experienced team to assess and provide planning recommendations that could prescribe the most efficient approach, ensuring the most pressing needs were addressed first.

They were looking for a partner that would be with them for the long term, and the experience of identifying issues and opportunities that they would not have seen or considered if they were doing the assessment and recommendations themselves. They reached out to the Empowered professional services team to begin that partnership with an assessment of their DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) environment to determine how they were set up, what was working today, and what was not working today. As an objective third party partner, Empowered could help avoid any internal political stresses and focus on the gaps and opportunities they observed in order to produce a prioritized road map for improvement, in the shortest period of time.

The recommendations and implementation road map were subsequently used by the executive sponsors as the basis for an internal business case. This business case provided the basis upon which they could build out and architect a modernized DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) framework.

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The Situation

The customer's DNS, DHCP, and IPAM (DDI) services remained unchanged over time with some organic operational evolution. Emerging technology changes such as cloud, mobile workforce, and IoT (Internet of Things), as well as increasing business and security uncertainty, mandated an assessment of how the existing DNS, DHCP, and IPAM services addressed these issues. There was a level of urgency considering that cybercriminals are becoming increasingly aware of the attack opportunities made possible by DNS vulnerabilities and are wasting little time in developing forms of malware that leverage DNS vulnerabilities. The assessment and recommendations would show them the problems that required immediate attention as well as the steps to resolve them, thereby improving the likelihood of a smooth DDI implementation project. In addition, the assessment supported an internal business case and plan that was required to move towards a DNS, DHCP, and IPAM solution that provided a more reliable and secure environment.

Challenge

They needed to quickly have a clear understanding of the current state of the DNS, DHCP, and IPAM environment; its strengths, deficiencies, and gaps with regards to their future desired state but did not have the organizational expertise or bandwidth required to complete the work.

Without an assessment it would be difficult to develop a set of clear, prioritized, and actionable recommendations for evolving DNS, DHCP, and IPAM capabilities that would be cost effective and guided by best practices.

The Solution

‍Engage and collaborate with Empowered as their trusted advisor for DNS, DHCP, and IPAM, to assess the current DDI deployment and to provide specific recommendations and road map objectives designed to help plan, implement, and achieve their DNS, DHCP, and IPAM desired state.                                                                                                                                                                                          

Working closely with Empowered through a series of planned interviews and comprehensive review of existing technical artifacts, Empowered engaged with the key DDI personnel, including DDI platform owners, architects, operators, consumers, and leadership team. Through thoughtful discussions and analysis, the Empowered team captured both known issues as well as discovering emergent issues that were not immediately apparent at the outset of the assessment.

Methodologies included:

• An understanding of the quality of data contained in each system
• Identification of deviations from best practices
• A review of current processes and work instructions that surround move, add, change, and delete operations on the current systems of record
• Review current integrations with the DDI systems of record via
• API or similar integration methods
• A review of current policy documents that pertain to DDI functions to understand how those policies might be accommodated in future phases of the implementation

An assessment report was produced, based on the assessment results that summarized the current state of the DDI environment, as well as a set of prioritized recommendations and road map objectives intended to modernize their DDI core services platform.

The Result

• A clear understanding of the current state of the DDI environment; its strengths, deficiencies, and gaps with regards to desired future state
• Best Practices Vision of Future State for corporate DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management
• A set of clear, prioritized, and actionable recommendations focused on addressing DDI deficiencies, evolving capabilities, and the implementation of best practices in the most cost-effective way possible
• A roadmap for the implementation of the recommendations
• An established partner to enable the business to move the DDI agenda forward