Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense Reviews

BloxOne is for DNS protection. We point our local domain name servers to it and it has a feed for "bad character" domain names. We protect our end-users that way. The way we're using it, that's all it does. It fits in somewhere in the middle of our security stack. DNS is the most important part of networking. Not so many people see it that way, but if you can't resolve, say, "cnn.com", nothing works. If your DNS doesn't work correctly, nothing is going to work correctly on your network. It is one of the first layers that comes into play when going to a website or using email.

It's a SaaS solution, a service that InfoBlox provides. All the systems are run by them and they maintain it.

It puts us at ease. We don't have to worry about so many DNS infiltrations. It has integrated and helped us make sure that our end-users don't visit websites that are not clean. Overall, it has helped with that side of our security.

BloxOne has also reduced the amount of effort for our SecOps team when investigating events. They have been using it and they're happy with it.

Overall, it's much easier to log, detect, and troubleshoot those aspects of the network.

The GUI has been improved a lot. It's easy to use and intuitive to navigate and to do whatever it is that you want to do with the system. Ease of use is one of the top features.

When it comes to helping to detect DNS threats, BloxOne is good on all fronts. The number of false positives is very low, close to none. More than once it has detected new names or lookalike names and protected us and saved us from bad characters.

The research side and the reporting side need improvement. Both of those are items on the menu. They could use a little bit of cleanup to make their respective information more easily understood.

I have been using Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense for a year and a half. 

We have not had any service outages with BloxOne. It has been very stable.

We have scaled it as far as we need to, and I have not seen any issues in that regard.

BloxOne gets used with every device in our enterprise that does DNS. As the number of devices grows, usage goes up. It is something that gets used without people even noticing that it's there. Almost the entire enterprise is using it.

As for increasing the use of its features, such as the integrations, we have talked about it, but we have way too many other projects and that has been put on the back burner.

The only time we contacted them for support was during the initial setup, and that's how we got our SE to help us with the categories. On a scale of one to 10, their support is a 12.

We have been using InfoBlox as a company for more than 10 years. Their support team is well-versed in their products. They know their stuff. And if they don't know something, or there is something they haven't worked with, they are very quick to bring in somebody who knows the environment better. They don't drag you along while they're trying to learn, and that is something I really like.

We used something else that does almost the same thing. It provided us with the ability to block DNS. We have been doing this for the past 20 years or so. We switched to BloxOne because it's cloud-based. Logging is easier. With all of the previous systems that we had, we had to sacrifice on the logging feature, reduce the logging, because we couldn't maintain that size of a log. With BloxOne, logging is in the cloud and it's not limited. Also, somebody else is maintaining it, which we like.

The initial setup was "in-between." It wasn't so complex, but it also was not so easy that anybody could do it. It had a learning curve, but the learning curve was not that bad. I tackled the learning curve by asking questions of my SE. He was able to give me directions about the best way to configure it.

The kinds of things I asked about were best practices around which categories to enable. I needed to better understand what all the categories were, and what they mean. The default settings were too rigid and we had to make some changes. The SE helped us to understand all the categories, which categories were redundant and which categories should be more relaxed.

We had a PoC deployment and then production. All together, they took about two to three working days.

Our implementation strategy was to set it up the way we believed it should be set up. We put it in a test environment and then realized that some of the categories were too restricted. We got on the phone and then made some changes to those categories. After a couple of weeks of testing, we put it into production. All the settings that needed to be enabled were enabled at that point.

The team that logs in, in administrative roles, includes about eight people, and I don't think they're in there that often. We're usually in there if there's a report of domains being blocked that shouldn't be blocked. For all intents and purposes, it is set-it-and-forget-it. It has been that simple. We don't go in there unless there is a very specific reason for taking a look at something.

For deployment, it was the networking team, so that everybody was aware of how it was set up. BloxOne doesn't require any maintenance because it's in the cloud and Infoblox is maintaining it.

We looked at BlueCat and Umbrella. We went with BloxOne because it integrates better with our system. The functionality also looked a little bit better than that of the other two products.

If a colleague said to me that their next-gen firewall and other security tools mean that they don't need a DNS-specific security solution, I would say to them that, in my opinion, security is layers. Just because you have one layer doesn't mean that you can remove other ones. They work hand-in-hand.

Do a proof of concept for your environment, a test environment, to make sure that it does what you want it to do. And try to understand the categories that it has. Spend some time understanding the categories before you enable them or put them into production.

The biggest lesson I have learned from using BloxOne is patience. It is the cloud, so when you click on something you have to give it a little bit of time to do whatever it needs to do in the back end, before it actually gets implemented. You have to be patient.

I'm sure it would be able to integrate with our firewall company, Palo Alto. But, at the moment, we haven't needed to do that.

We use it for DNS, DHCP, IPAM in general, and DNS Threat Defense.

I administrate the DDI feature set.

We use Azure and AWS as our cloud providers.

We are currently in the phase of planning and integration with Azure Sentinel. We are also using a BloxOne Threat Defense client on each of our computers to actively block malicious websites.

BloxOne provides automatic sharing of network context data, which affects our speed of threat response and provides real-time threat intelligence. Our security operation team needs this to do their work. It makes us feel safer.

We have more visibility, granularity, and contextual information about threats.

DNS and DHCP are essential. Threat Defense is a very good feature. We use all of them and are very satisfied.

BloxOne is very good at helping to detect DNS threats. We are using it on a daily basis. It has helped us identifying possible data exfiltration events already. We detected a possible data exfiltration attempt, which Infoblox BloxOne helped us to identify. We came to the conclusion that this is normal behavior. Now, we are actively blocking certain web pages with improper content, like porn sites. 

We are using Infoblox DDI for IPAM, DNS and DHCP stuff. There is a certain policy in place when it comes to DNS resolution. DDI affects our network and operations in a very positive way. With Threat Defense, we are controlling the DNS traffic. We can make sure that certain DNS domains are resolved only over our internal DNS service. Others are using public DNS servers. We are separating traffic on our VPN networks this way. It is not actually fine-graded, but we are starting to implement more detailed policies.

It is using just the DNS resolution. Regardless of which protocol is then used after the DNS resolution has occurred, the possible block of accessing that resource is already in place. So, it doesn't matter which protocol you are using afterwards.

The general administration webpage, i.e., their portal, needs improvement. In the past two years, it is much better than it used to be, but there are still some things that would need improvement when it comes to the design of the webpage or finding information. This  may also be due to the way that we are using the web portal. We have a very large network and the way we categorize is a little cumbersome to administer.

The DDI systems of BloxOne are black boxes to us, which implies that actually we don't see what is going on inside there. We would like to see a little bit more of what is going on inside that box, e.g., monitoring and general feedback of the box. We want to know, "What is the box actually doing right now?" This is part of the solution because it is SaaS. We need to learn that the actual DNS and DHCP server is not our system anymore, because it's actually maintained by a different company, namely Infoblox. So, we either need to rethink this or trust another company to do that stuff for us.

I have been using it for two years now.

Now, BloxOne is very stable and good. Two years ago, it was a little flaky.

The scalability is very good.

There are about 100 offices worldwide with about 10,000 people working with the solution. Whenever we need a new system, it is deployed within 30 minutes or so. 

The technical support used to be better. When it comes to day-to-day work, they are very fast and reliable. Within the past two years, we discovered certain bugs in their products. The resolution of these bugs took a little too much time, especially if our production environment is down for a certain amount of time, then we are losing money. That is hard to convey to Infoblox support, e.g., we actually need the system up and running again within two or three hours. The awareness of these so-called production down incidents is not really easy to convey.

BloxOne has enabled our monitoring, detection, and response processes. We didn't have such a solution previously. Before using Infoblox, we didn't know.

When it comes to the DDI side of things, we now can work more granularly. We have a more controlled way of doing DNS resolutions. Before, we used Microsoft DNS and Microsoft DHCP, and those Microsoft products don't have the features that Infoblox has.

The main benefit of the Microsoft built-in solutions is that they are free of charge because they are part of the operating system. The main con is they don't have the feature set that Infoblox has. 

Before Infoblox, we used to have a management solution called BlueCat, which worked well but didn't scale like Infoblox. They also didn't have the feature set available. 

BloxOne can detect threats that cannot be detected by the other security tools that we have evaluated. Previously, we didn't have this threat analysis at all.

The DNS and DHCP are actually not that complicated. They make sense. On a scale between one and 10, it is a five in terms of complexity. Since using Infoblox, I came to the conclusion that there is more inside of DNS than simply resolving a name into an IP address and the other way around. These are things that I didn't know before.

The preparation took us two months or so. The actual implementation was done within two days. We deployed all the DNS and DHCP systems, together with the Threat Defense, in a parallel way. Then, within these two days, we switched over from the old infrastructure to the new infrastructure, and kept the old infrastructure as caching-only systems. We then switched one server after another over to the new systems.

We deployed it with the help of a third-party consultant. We were very satisfied with their work. They had the knowledge to help us do a migration for a big-scale environment. While this was a third-party consultant, Infoblox was always reachable. Infoblox knew that we were doing this switch and support was informed. So, we could call Infoblox support and they immediately reacted. Everybody was fully available and aware of this major change for us.

As far as I know, Infoblox BloxOne offers pretty good documentation. Check its documentation, then do a PoC. Infoblox is very good at providing PoCs. Take your time to learn the solution before going to production with it.

We investigated two systems beside Microsoft and BlueCat.

Due to the changes in general technology, everybody is moving out of their on-premise environments to the cloud, which has completely different threats. Look at your spam folder in your mailbox. There are a lot of emails claiming to be from a trusted platform, when in fact, they are not. For example, all these phishing emails and domain names written with different letter letters, like the Cyrillic alphabet or Arabic letters. They look alphabetic, when in fact, they are completely different. All these things are caught by buying Infoblox.

Hopefully, they don't extract any data from our data streams. But to a certain degree, they need to take a look at the data that is actually transferred so they can find malicious content.

We are still in the adoption phase and simply don't have the time to dig or dive into all the possibilities this product gives us.

I would rate it as a nine out of 10.

Hybrid Cloud

I primarily use Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense in the banking sector and oil and gas industries.

The most useful aspect of Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is its user-friendly interface and its powerful analytic reporting. The product has been implemented in the banking sector.

If Infoblox invests in network observability, especially from the perspective of DNS and IP address observability, it could be a significant improvement.

I have experience with this product for eight months.

I have faced quite a few problems in my eight months of experience with the product in GTS, despite it being a relatively short period.

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense can be expensive for the commercial sector, particularly in Egypt, as this sector does not have a huge budget compared to banking or oil and gas, as the regulations are not as strict.

My overall rating for Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is eight out of ten.

From an Infoblox perspective, it's interesting because it is pretty much about dedicated security-focused customers who are looking for advanced technology. It wouldn't be suitable for a customer who hasn't addressed their web security or firewall needs. 

So it's mainly targeted toward larger enterprise customers, and there are only a handful of the customers who are for Infoblox in New Zealand.

Picking the most valuable feature is like asking what your favorite color is. It depends on what problem you're trying to solve for a customer. If a customer has a specific requirement regarding DNS security, then they would consider Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense. If they are looking for a data lake, they might explore other options. It really depends on the exact needs of the customer. It's all dependent on the customer's requirements and the specific use case.

You wouldn't sell it to a customer who only has five to ten users. It's meant for customers with a large IP base and a strong cybersecurity posture. Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense furthers the existing security posture rather than replacing or trying to replace any existing products. It supplements what you already have. You can't supplement something that you don't have in the first place. It's going to integrate with your existing systems, such as your security tools, data sources, and firewalls.

From a technical perspective, it's a good product. It performs its intended functions well. 

However, from a channel perspective, it would be beneficial to have a scaled-down version for partners or customers who may not have the enterprise-level scale but still want to enjoy the benefits of the solution.

I have been working with it hands-on since about September last year. I use the latest version.

From what I understand, it is fairly stable. I haven't heard any complaints about it.

From a scalability perspective, it scales high, so I would rate it a ten. However, it doesn't scale down well; that's a problem. I work with businesses of all sizes, depending on their needs.

The initial setup is not a simple "click-click-next" installation. It requires some level of experience and technical know-how. So the installation process is quite challenging. 

The time taken to install the solution could be days because it is a project-based installation. So it's not like a firewall where you can simply set it up and start monitoring. It would involve several days or even professional services consulting, depending on the specific requirements of the customer.

From my perspective, I have two engineers dedicated to the implementation process. But the number of engineers required can vary. It depends on the complexity and size of the project. It could take longer if you have a larger team working on it.

When it comes to maintenance, from an advanced enterprise perspective, you would typically have an entire team dedicated to your security posture. So you would have a team behind the maintenance of the solution.

It's a pricey solution because it's for the advanced kind of customer. It's not gonna be cheap. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The pricing model is on an annual basis. There are additional costs for support.

I would advise understanding what problem you are trying to solve. That's the key. Overall, I would rate it an eight out of ten. 

Hybrid Cloud

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

We were already an Infoblox customer for IP address management, DNS, and DHCP and we decided to beef up our security in another avenue as far as the company and its network. So this is one area we got into with Infoblox because of their DNS security. I previously worked for another company in Boston that was an Infoblox customer, and on DNS security originally you had to set up a connection with Infoblox. The threat feeds that analyze the traffic, the customer had to receive those feeds. This is some years back when they first got into this.

So now, with Pegasystems we're doing the same thing, however, Infoblox is doing this in the cloud, which is infinitely better for a customer like us, meaning that they take in all the threat information and analyze our traffic. All we have to do is set up normal connections to the internet. It's like talking to another website. There's firewall security involved, but that's the most important thing for analyzing Infoblox, the fact that they provide this service out on the internet, in the cloud, is huge for us because they have the ability to synthesize a number of different sources for DNS security, put it in their secret sauce in their portal, and all we have to do is communicate with it and then they inspect our traffic. That is the most important thing for us as a customer. 

I realize that other companies do that as well, but because Infoblox is an important part of our network infrastructure it makes a lot of sense to do our DNS security with Infoblox. We're also a Palo Alto Firewall customer, and we have traffic that goes out to the internet. All of our traffic going out to the internet gets inspected by Palo Alto firewalls. They have a similar service, but we chose to partner with Infoblox because they're already in the DNS arena and have been for a number of years.

Our ability to detect data exfiltration was minimal before Infoblox and the cloud portal was instituted for us. In terms of DNS security as a whole, we had some capability with our firewalls, but this is a lot more specialized because we're sending all of our DNS requests to Infoblox. I'd say we improved 100%.

The actual communications that go on between our DNS appliances and the threat engines in the cloud, that traffic get logged by Infoblox, so that information is available in the cloud, and we also export logs to, we have a Splunk system. So in terms of data exfiltration, Infoblox does a good job of identifying any threats in that arena. Now, if something like that comes up and gets logged, it gets flagged by our Splunk system. I work in the network operations team, we have a security knock. If some kind of alert in that realm was logged, they would be alerted, meaning our security folks. Then if we need to take action on someone's machine or a server then it gets triggered from our security, security operations. I would rate the identification of data exfiltration with a high mark.

Our primary interoperability is with Splunk. The log feed into Splunk got set up right after we signed up for the portal. They go hand in hand. It's because our security team uses Splunk to analyze data. This means they get information from the portal, and they also get information from our individual appliances in the various offices as well.

BloxOne Threat Defense reduced the amount of effort involved in our SecOps teams when investigating events.

Our security staff has been added to significantly in the last few years. I started with Pega in 2017 when there were only a handful of security people, but we were a 5,000 employee company. I think we're probably around 6,000 now.  It wasn't just tools, they didn't have enough people to manage the security posture the way they are now. They basically created a whole new department. This platform is just one of many things that they receive data from.

Our monitoring and detection capability was minimal before we got into BloxOne. Now it's an improvement.

There's reporting and monitoring in the portal itself, and what customers can view. Additionally there are add-on programs specifically for Infoblox programs that go with Splunk. There are several tools available that add extra visibility.

Some of the tools that are involved with Splunk, Infoblox can be consulted on to help identify specific pieces of data that our security team is looking for. That's a plus because in this arena there's a lot of data that gets produced and making sense of it is the whole ballgame. Even though Splunk is not an Infoblox product, it's Splunk, but when our security folks receive data from Infoblox and they're not sure exactly how to massage it, there are content folks at Infoblox who help sort through stuff like that. The way that works is that we set up a call or a Webex/Zoom and just hash out with our security team exactly what they're trying to do.

If we had to take a look at where we are right now, Palo Alto is trying to get more business with us and at some point, we will probably take a look at what they offer in this space, which is just to get educated on the marketplace. The fact that we're a Palo Alto customer, we look to them to add value as well. I'm not saying we're changing anything right now, I'm just saying in our company because we're a big Palo Alto customer, we'll be looking at things they're going to be doing in the future as well.

We're using BloxOne strictly on the cloud version, but there are threat defense options that can be done with our onsite appliances into what Infoblox calls "the Grid". The Grid is just the collection of appliances that we have in the various offices, and there's a central management tool called the Grid Master where you can set up additional threat defense options, meaning you can inspect traffic even before it leaves the network. That's something we're going to be looking at as well. We're not doing it, but we're going to be looking at it.

Our initial activation in this arena, because it was so straightforward to just forward traffic right to the portal, which can be done in just a few minutes and actually have it inspect traffic in the first hour. It's not that we've precluded the onsite, but it's just something that we're looking at as a follow-up. We don't feel that we're at a major detriment, but it could improve some of the things we're doing if we do it onsite even before it gets to the cloud. Before they had the cloud portal you had to take in the threat feeds that they use or are available on the internet, and feed them into your own network, which makes it a lot more complicated.

That's still available. People will still do that, but we choose to use Infoblox and let them synthesize the threat feeds that they have access to.

This is not just Infoblox, this could be any portal provider, cloud provider, sometimes they change the look of the customer-facing options and it's not completely clear why they make the change.

It's not just cosmetic. I'll find things that they've moved around after they've done an upgrade. That's a valid criticism of any portal app because they don't poll every user to ask how you want to see the menu options. Everybody gets the same thing.

I have been using Infoblox since 2019.

I would rate their technical support an eight out of ten. 

Positive

The initial setup was straightforward. The options for the appliances were clearly documented. The onsite logging is actually a virtual host in our network. The setup for that was pretty straightforward as well. There was good documentation.

It took basically one day to start communicating with the portal and verify that all the appliances were actually, in fact, sending data to the portal and their traffic was being inspected. It didn't take a whole day to set that up, most of the time was just, it was a few hours of setup and several hours of monitoring, just learning what to look for. But it was pretty straightforward.

Our on-sight Infoblox DNS DHCP appliances, which there are about 30 of them around the world, there's one screen of information where you put in the Infoblox cloud IP address, answer a few questions, then that triggers DNS forwarding to the Infoblox cloud portal. So when we send our DNS traffic out to the internet it goes to Infoblox first in order to get inspected. If for some reason a particular office or a particular appliance is unable to communicate with Infoblox at a particular time at that cloud IP, they're still able to forward DNS traffic directly to the internet as a backup. That can happen for normal communication disruption. It doesn't happen a lot, but at least our DNS queries don't stop completely if there's an interruption somewhere out on the internet. Which, again, doesn't happen often, but it's good to have available.

We do some configuration on our Infoblox appliances. On the user side of the portal, there are options for reporting and monitoring that get set up by the customer, but Infoblox sets up sessions with us whenever we ask. Initially, when we became a portal customer we received training from Infoblox, and if we want a refresher or we have somebody new who we want to go through the training they'll assist. What they usually do is have the local Infoblox team in Boston assist with that kind of training as well. 

It's not protocol agnostic. It's specifically analyzing DNS traffic. Now, if there's data inside the DNS traffic that is being used for non-DNS purposes, that's different. They are not analyzing other protocols, they are just analyzing DNS. So we use other tools to analyze other protocols, primarily firewalls.

I would rate Infoblox an eight out of ten. 

Public Cloud

We use BloxOne for their threat defense product, where basically it acts as a firewall in DNS traffic. So, if a domain has malware on it, it can intercept that even before it gets to our firewall. We don't give any response to dangerous domains.

It is web-based. So, we have the current version. It connects to their traditional Infoblox application. Those traditional applications have to basically point to forward to request to BloxOne.

I don't have any metrics, but we have had some instances where a domain was compromised, and BloxOne blocked the traffic before our firewall vendor did it on their side.

BloxOne’s security system integrations provide automatic sharing of network context data. It has improved some of the things a bit. We don't have everything turned up all the way, but for what we do have, it does give another data point. So, if two or more sources are saying that there is a problem, it helps identify that we definitely need to treat a destination as a problem.

BloxOne is protocol-agnostic when it comes to blocking at the DNS level. It is not a huge feature for us, but it is definitely a concern. We have a lot of different applications that we support for various reasons, and it is definitely important that all of them be considered. We have a pretty wide footprint of things we need to support.

The automatic blocklists are most valuable. A box can maintain several lists from which we can choose if we need to block more or less. We don't have to manually manage the lists ourselves. They're automatically updated.

The automatic sharing of network context data helps to provide real-time threat intelligence.

The onboarding is a little rough at times, and you need to have some information at hand. It is pretty good, but it would be useful to have a few good examples to set up things like data exfiltration.

The customer service team from Infoblox has been frustrating to deal with a few times.

I have been using this solution for about a year. We've been using Infoblox for several years, but we moved over to the BloxOne services in the last year.

I haven't noticed any issues with stability for it. It has been pretty good.

I have not seen any issues with scalability. We have probably about a half dozen users. They are network engineers and security administrators.

We do have plans to increase its usage. It is not used extensively. We have a baseline to look for the biggest threats, and then we hope to increase that usage as time goes by.

Lately, they have been a six out of 10. They've been very short-staffed due to world events. They've been down a notch.

We did not use any other solution.

We did have to do implementation on our side. We did it with professional services assistance. It was a bit complex. There was some back and forth on it. We had to get some network information, and we had to work around some unusual configurations on our Infoblox setup to integrate properly. There is basically an easy setting that probably works for over half of customers, but we were not able to use that, so we had to go through a more complex alternative procedure.

The primary deployment took about six to eight hours, which wasn't bad. For adding additional devices, we have a worked-out procedure, and it literally takes 10 to 20 minutes a device.

We implemented it as part of an overall system upgrade. So, it was basically an add-on to where we were upgrading hardware appliances and VMs onsite, and we did BloxOne as part of that.

For its maintenance, it is pretty much just me, and it requires very little active maintenance. Once it is set up, it pretty much runs on its own. It is very maintenance-free. It is essentially a web application, so it is run by Infoblox. They basically just check it every now and then.

Its implementation was done by Infoblox professional services.

To my knowledge, our company hasn't done a return on investment for BloxOne. We don't plan to do one at this point. It is just not the highest priority because of a few other projects that are going on.

It is a very expensive system. You need to go over the licensing before purchase to make sure you're getting what is needed, not anything extra.

There are a couple of features at an extra cost, but they are more for Infoblox, not BloxOne. So, I wouldn't really count them. We use other Infoblox products, and BloxOne bills get rolled into them.

We've briefly looked at some of the solutions. It was integrated with our existing system, so it really didn't make sense to change.

We may look at alternatives in a few years, but it won't probably happen for two to three years at this point. We would like to keep an eye on what's out there. We have had some issues with not necessarily the support, but the customer service team from Infoblox has been frustrating to deal with a few times. So, we would like to keep our options open.

With the assistance of professional services, it is very simple to install. It is mainly time-consuming. I would advise getting a good, clear view of how your network works before implementing anything.

We are not heavily using it to detect DNS threats such as data exfiltration, Domain Generation Algorithms (DGAs), Fast Flux, lookalike domains, and fileless malware. We may use these features in the future. We have also not yet integrated it with security systems such as vulnerability scanners, ITSM, SIEM/SOAR, NAC, and next-gen endpoint security. Similarly, we don't use BloxOne DDI for policy settings based on IPAM and DNS data.

It hasn't substantially reduced the amount of effort involved for our SecOps teams when investigating events. It has given us another tool to look at, but it hasn't been a major change. It has also not detected threats that cannot be detected by other security tools. Sometimes, there are faster options.

To a colleague who says that their next-gen firewall and other security tools mean that they don’t need a DNS-specific security solution, I would probably advise looking at some of the DNS-related issues where firewalls aren't going to be that helpful, such as data exfiltration.

The biggest lesson that I have learned from using this solution is to keep an eye on what your devices are actually doing. We've seen a lot of traffic issues with Infoblox where the root cause of an issue is actually the underlying hardware it is on, and there is nothing you can really do about that, unfortunately.

I would rate BloxOne a seven out of 10.

Most of the use cases are for the DNS protocols. As 90% or 91% of drivers use DNS, everybody is concerned about securing this protocol. 

I am not from the customer side; I am from the vendor side. I give support to various customers here in Pakistan. We have deployments with hybrid data, and we also have purely on-premises deployments.

The dossier feature is perfect for starting an investigation.

The integration of threat intelligence with other solutions is challenging. If I want to expose threat intelligence, I cannot do it via taxi services. I have to call the API, but the customers are not into creating the APIs. The integration of embedded threat intelligence with other platforms should be better. Infoblox should work on this, and it should be easier for the end user to integrate it. It is very easy to deploy this solution. We should be able to integrate it with other platforms, such as the Next-Generation Firewall, with the same ease.

I have been using Infoblox products for more than four years now. I have around one year of experience in monitoring and evaluating Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense.

Its scalability has no concerns and is perfectly fine. For scalability, I rank Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense on the top of the line. They have recently introduced the SDLA agreement in which you have as many VMs as you want to have under the same license. It has a good architecture for scalability, so by using the manager, you can add multiple appliances. You can use any tasks.

Their technical support is good but not perfect. Things need to be improved. The biggest challenge of Infoblox support is that for troubleshooting any issue, you have to download the support bundle and traffic caption and then upload it to the support site. Someone then looks into it, and it can take them a day or a time like that, but overall, their support is good.

Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense is very straightforward. The initial setup is easy, but it might be because I have been using it for a quite long time. The viewer is perfectly fine. Reporting is also fine. It is very easy to set up.

The deployment hardly took two days. It also depends on the size of the organization. If you have only four to five instances of DNS servers, four to five VM sets will not take more than two days. If you have a big setup, in which you have multiple instances of DNS, and you have physical appliances, it will obviously take time.

I would highly recommend this solution. I am basically doing the pre-sales of Infoblox, so I highly recommended this solution. If you talk about competitors like F5, BlueCat, no solution is comparable to Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense. Infoblox is doing VDI and selling VDI solutions for more than a decade. They are experts at the solution.

I would rate Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense a nine out of ten. It needs tight integration and better support. 

We use this solution for DNS defense, against DNS tunneling and data exfiltration.

The most valuable feature of this solution is the granularity for which you can categorize what you want to block versus what you don't want to block.

You have a direct connection with Infoblox support for everything that they're hosting at the in the bloxonecloud at the moment. You don't have to go through a partner.

This solution integrates with the Infoblox appliances, so you don't need Excel sheets or external databases to administer what you've got deployed. All of the IP addresses are known.

The documentation needs to be improved. This solution is being rapidly developed at the moment and the documentation is lagging behind. The integration examples in NIOS guide and online threatdefense online documentation don't always match up. To the current gui of the CSP platform.

We would like to see more reporting capabilities that are now offered only with the on-premises reporting appliance.

We have been using this solution for about one and a half years.

This is a stable solution and we haven't had an outage here yet.

In the cloud, this solution is very scalable. Especially for the data exfiltration part because you don't have to rely on your on-premises CPU capacity, as it is done from Infoblox itself.

You don't even see how much it scales, although you have to adjust your subscription accordingly. It's actually a gentleman's agreement in terms of the license, so if you don't oversubscribe on your connections then they don't enforce the targets.

We have about four hundred mobile users who are being protected while they are off-premises, and internally we are defending about twenty-five hundred users.

It is used on a daily basis. All of our internal DNS queries are passed through this solution and we have approximately twenty thousand active IP addresses.

The technical support is good.

For everything in the cloud, support is called BloxOne. You get a reaction within one hour. They're experts at their own products and you get the right experts straight away.

I have experience with several firewall vendors including F10, Infoblox, Palo Alto, Cisco ACI, ASUS, and Nexus.

The initial setup of this solution is very straightforward.

In regards to on-premises appliances, the cloud solution is very straightforward.

With the internal infrastructure complete, the basic setup should be up and running in about an hour.

I performed the deployment.

One person is sufficient for deployment and maintenance.

The licensing is set up such that you pay for the number of active users that you're defending at the moment. It is similar to the model used by Cisco Umbrella.

One of the main differences between Infoblox and Cisco Umbrella is that Infoblox supports the DNS check completely, whereas Cisco Umbrella does not. You can also see the original client IP address and not just the outgoing IP address.

In terms of scalability, Infoblox is the better solution.

This is a solution that I recommend.

I would rate this solution a nine out of ten.