Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense Reviews

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.

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. 

BloxOne is the first layer of the onion. The first layer is DNS, which is the easiest place to block something. That's what the CSP does. We have a couple of block lists with domains to screen out. The simplest way to stop a TLS tunnel from your organization is to prevent them from resolving the IP address. If they honestly try to make a TLS connection to an IP address, it's going to get bucked straight away. It's a cloud service. We don't have an agent. Our on-prem DNS servers reach out to the CSP.

Because we have an onion-layer approach, it's obvious when somebody is resolving something that we don't want them to resolve. BloxOne filters out the noise, and we have more filters down the line on the other side. It does its job.

They were offering all these fancy features, and I just wanted the single sign-on. I don't need role-based access control because I have five guys logging into it, not 500. I have fewer requirements, but I only wanted to use passwords. That integration was good, though. 

I can't say it decreased the amount of work we do. It almost increased demand because it's so good at blocking. For example, it might accidentally block a content delivery network. The CDN might be the third or fourth resolved domain. It will resolve a few tests before it finally gets to cdn.com. You might have blocked cdn.com, but it's hard to attribute it to the first resolved domain. It isn't easy to attribute it all the way along. It's doing its job, but it's just a little more difficult to attribute when something doesn't work.

You need to be kind of careful. It's very powerful, but it's almost too powerful because you can shoot yourself in the foot. That's good and bad. It's blocking everything on the whole network. You can't get around it. 

If someone told me they didn't need DNS protection, I would say they don't understand security architecture very well. There's a reason why we set it up as a layered system rather than having one system controlling everything. If that system fails, it's going to be spectacular. The proxy will do a certain amount of filtering, and the DNS will do some. The end-point will do some filtering or popping, and all those layers combine to provide an in-depth defense. You're doomed to fail if you do everything all in one place.

The most valuable feature is the blocklisting. It's good at what I like to describe as the "silly side cases." We have this annoying security architecture that says we must do this, that, and the other, so we try to make it easier on ourselves. 

We install the agent somewhere and implement a policy that says you can't resolve anything unless I put it on an allow list. It's flipped instead of the average user experience that lets you go anywhere except for what's on the blocklist. When you have these silly side cases that only affect a couple of users, you can make a policy specifically for those users and then flip it. You block everything except for specific factors. That's powerful and a good use case for flexibility.

I was a happy customer until last week. Last week, I tried to go to Google, and it didn't work. It didn't resolve. Eventually, we discovered it was a server issue where BloxOne wouldn't fix anything Google-related. You couldn't access Google, YouTube, or anything like that.

We hacked it so that it worked,  but we had more issues the next day. Whatever they've done in the last week is an absolute mess, which has harmed our trust in the product. Before that, I never had a single problem. Unfortunately, they dented my trust in it by breaking something in the Frankfurt Data Center. I don't know how they managed to do such a lousy job. 

I have been using BloxOne for three or four years.

BloxOne works 99 percent of the time, but 1 percent can be a significant problem. The solution is in such a privileged position within our security architecture that it will be an issue when it fails, however rarely.

I'd rate Infoblox support five out of 10 because I can't remember my support experience well. It was good that they fixed the problem with the upgrade. I haven't had to interact with the support that much, which is a good thing.

Neutral

We previously had Windows DNS. It wasn't robust enough. I don't know the specifics of why it wasn't that good, but I know it didn't work for us.

The setup was horrible. About a year ago, Infoblox made us re-enroll all our on-prem DNS servers by a set date to a specific version, or it would stop working. I told my colleague, "Oh, here, we have to upgrade the servers and reconnect them to the CSP." That did not go well at all. 

That went so horribly wrong that we had to have three sessions with Infoblox support and start again. The overall upgrade experience was awful. That problem took us about a week or two to fix.

We have a consultant to work on implementations, but I don't think he was involved in the upgrade because Infoblox told us that the upgrade needs to be done in-house. 

My parent company and its subsidiaries were already on Infoblox, so we're an Infoblox family now.

I rate BloxOne four out of 10. We have problems with the agents, and they randomly blocked me from Google and Frankfurt. There's also the upgrade problem.

My advice is to be careful. I tried to install the agent remotely on my laptop about a year and a half ago. It didn't play well with our other products on our company laptops, and it almost broke my computer. I would've bricked my laptop and had to come into the office. I also tried to implement BloxOne on the MDM mobiles. That was horrendous. They're planning to touch the agent again and see if it'll have another go at it.

Half the reason could be Apple's forcing them in one direction or the other, but it's pathetic. I gave up. I tried to do a whole task with the MDM phones and use Infoblox as the first layer, but it absolutely would not work to save its life.

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.

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.

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. 

The solution is primarily used for protecting DNS and customers from malware.

DNS Firewall can protect the DNS from DNS exploitation.

The dashboard and reporting features need improvement. The user needs more informative dashboards so they can get to the results directly without having to search deep into the report to pull out information.

The solution is very stable.

With the model we have, we are able to scale very easily if we need to.

We rarely need to contact technical support, but when we do they are very helpful.

The initial setup is straightforward. It's not trivial or easy to implement it, but it's also not that complicated. It's somewhere in between. Deployment typically takes two to three days. You don't need more than one or two people for deployment and maintenance.

We handled the implementation ourselves.

The solution offers two types of licensing options.

You can get a license on a one-year or three-year term. The cost depends on the services that you want to use and the number of users you have. 

They now also have a subscription where you can pay on a monthly basis. 

Usually, there is a cost for implementation either via the vendor or a local partner. 

We use the on-premises deployment model.

I would advise others to take the whole DNS Firewall subscription because it will add value to their solution.

I would rate the solution at nine out of ten.

Our primary use case for Infoblox is to ensure DNS security.

Infoblox DNS Firewall improved our organization by checking that all traffic came from a proper IP address.

The most important features for us are preventing DDOS DNS attacks.

Endpoint solutions need to improved.

So far the solution is really helping. The stability looks okay.

There are currently no users since we are in the POC state. Eventually, we will have around 1,000 users.

The setup was fairly straightforward. Deployment took about two days.

The implementation was done by the company itself.