How Men & Mice can help companies to successfully implement integrated management of their DNS
Rebecca Gibson |
This article first appeared in the
Winter 2017 issue of The Record.
Migrating network infrastructures to the cloud helps companies to save costs, increase agility and operational efficiency, but it also introduces new challenges to provisioning and managing the domain name system (DNS).
“Organisations rely on external DNS to run their online employee- and customer-facing systems, applications and services, so it’s imperative that they are available, responsive and secure at all times,” says Sigfus Magnusson, vice president of product management at Men & Mice. “DNS in the cloud allows for critical system redundancy. The problem is that migrating DNS to the cloud often leaves companies with additional complexity, having to adopt multiple management systems for multiple platforms. This poses a risk in itself. On top of that, a company’s ability to build automation for its zone data is key to cloud success. This is complicated by having to deal with different APIs for different cloud vendors.”
This is where tools like the Men & Mice DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management (DDI) Suite can help. Built with an agnostic software overlay architecture on the back end, the Men & Mice Suite pulls together critical DNS, DHCP and IP address management data from on-premise, cloud, hybrid and multi-cloud environments, allowing companies to manage networks via a centralised system.
“Customers can use the Men & Mice DDI Suite to move their external DNS from on-premise systems to one or more cloud platforms, then use one policy to manage everything in one system,” Magnusson explains. “Our xDNS redundancy feature facilitates the integrated system redundancy that is essential for combatting the threat of network outages due to human error or distributed denial of services attacks.”
In addition, xDNS redundancy provides centralised replication and synchronisation of DNS zones across multiple DNS service provider platforms. Using the advanced Men & Mice application programming interfaces and tool sets to build automation, xDNS redundancy offers companies the freedom to better distribute DNS loads based on zone priority, performance requirements and accompanying costs.
The Men & Mice DDI Suite was also the first application of its kind to be integrated with Microsoft Azure DNS.
“This enables us to provide our customers with a tried and tested, seamless path for migrating their external DNS into Microsoft Azure DNS, while our Microsoft partnership means we can provide new functionality to our customers as soon as it is introduced,” says Magnusson. “The Men & Mice Suite is a great fit for any company wanting to reap the rewards of moving their DNS to the cloud, while retaining centralised management of their critical network services.”