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DDI Directions: DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management Strategies for Multi-Cloud Era

Shamus McGillicuddy

DDI technology has become more challenging in recent years with the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, according to a new report, DDI Directions: DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management Strategies for the Multi-Cloud Era, from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™).

DNS, DHCP, and IP address management are a suite of core services essential to network connectivity and communications. DDI suites manage the assignment of IP addresses and the mapping of those addresses to DNS domains for both internal and external communications. People who lack networking expertise may think DDI is trivial, but an ineffective approach to these core services can lead to sluggish network operations, chronic downtime, security breaches, and worse.

As with switching, routing, and security, network teams often struggle to extend their DDI architecture into the cloud because they lack control and influence over cloud strategy. Cloud teams often adopt cloud-native tools without the network team's involvement, leading to a bifurcated approach to DDI services that creates complexity and inefficient operations. The new research explores this issue in depth, along with several other major themes, including network automation, DDI security, APIs, integration, and Ipv6.

This research reveals that DDI technology is pivotal to multi-cloud networking, network security, and network automation. IT organizations must invest in solutions that can support these priorities. Do-it-yourself approaches to DDI are untenable in the multi-cloud era.

Additionally, the report provides dozens of best practices for how IT organizations can improve their design and management of DDI services.

Some of the key findings from the report include:

■ Only 31% of enterprises are completely successful with their DDI strategies.

■ 39% of organizations think their DDI solution is an effective source of truth for network automation.

■ Less than 31% of organizations are fully confident in the security of their DNS infrastructure.

■ 59% of DDI teams have sufficient influence over cloud strategy.

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DDI Directions: DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management Strategies for Multi-Cloud Era

Shamus McGillicuddy

DDI technology has become more challenging in recent years with the rise of hybrid and multi-cloud architectures, according to a new report, DDI Directions: DNS, DHCP, and IP Address Management Strategies for the Multi-Cloud Era, from Enterprise Management Associates (EMA™).

DNS, DHCP, and IP address management are a suite of core services essential to network connectivity and communications. DDI suites manage the assignment of IP addresses and the mapping of those addresses to DNS domains for both internal and external communications. People who lack networking expertise may think DDI is trivial, but an ineffective approach to these core services can lead to sluggish network operations, chronic downtime, security breaches, and worse.

As with switching, routing, and security, network teams often struggle to extend their DDI architecture into the cloud because they lack control and influence over cloud strategy. Cloud teams often adopt cloud-native tools without the network team's involvement, leading to a bifurcated approach to DDI services that creates complexity and inefficient operations. The new research explores this issue in depth, along with several other major themes, including network automation, DDI security, APIs, integration, and Ipv6.

This research reveals that DDI technology is pivotal to multi-cloud networking, network security, and network automation. IT organizations must invest in solutions that can support these priorities. Do-it-yourself approaches to DDI are untenable in the multi-cloud era.

Additionally, the report provides dozens of best practices for how IT organizations can improve their design and management of DDI services.

Some of the key findings from the report include:

■ Only 31% of enterprises are completely successful with their DDI strategies.

■ 39% of organizations think their DDI solution is an effective source of truth for network automation.

■ Less than 31% of organizations are fully confident in the security of their DNS infrastructure.

■ 59% of DDI teams have sufficient influence over cloud strategy.

Hot Topics

The Latest

Many organizations describe AI as strategic, but they do not manage it strategically. When AI plans are disconnected from strategy, detached from organizational learning, and protected from serious assumptions testing, the problem is no longer technical immaturity; it is a failure of management discipline ... Executives too often tell organizations to "use AI" before they define what AI is supposed to change. The problem deepens in organizations where strategy isn't well articulated in the first place ...

Across the enterprise technology landscape, a quiet crisis is playing out. Organizations have run hundreds, sometimes thousands, of generative AI pilots. Leadership has celebrated the proof of concept (POCs) ... Industry experience points to a sobering reality: only 5-10% of AI POCs that progress to the pilot stage successfully reach scaled production. The remaining 90% fail because the enterprise environment around them was never ready to absorb them, not the AI models ...

Today's modern systems are not what they once were. Organizations now rely on distributed systems, event-driven workflows, hybrid and multi-cloud environments and continuous delivery pipelines. While each adds flexibility, it also introduces new, often invisible failures. Development speed is no longer the primary bottleneck of innovation. Reliability is ...

Seeing is believing, or in this case, seeing is understanding, according to New Relic's 2025 Observability Forecast for Retail and eCommerce report. Retailers who want to provide exceptional customer experiences while improving IT operations efficiency are leaning on observability ... Here are five key takeaways from the report ...

Technology leaders across the federal landscape are facing, and will continue to face, an uphill battle when it comes to fortifying their digital environments against hostile and persistent threat actors. On one hand, they are being asked to push digital transformation ... On the other hand, they are facing the fiscal uncertainty of continuing resolutions (CR) and government shutdowns looming near and far. In the face of these challenges, CIOs, CTOs, and CISOs must figure out how to modernize legacy systems and infrastructure while doing more with less and still defending against external and internal threats ...

Reliability is no longer proven by uptime alone, according to the The SRE Report 2026 from LogicMonitor. In the AI era, it is experienced through speed, consistency, and user trust, and increasingly judged by business impact. As digital services grow more complex and AI systems move into production, traditional monitoring approaches are struggling to keep pace, increasing the need for AI-first observability that spans applications, infrastructure, and the Internet ...

If AI is the engine of a modern organization, then data engineering is the road system beneath it. You can build the most powerful engine in the world, but without paved roads, traffic signals, and bridges that can support its weight, it will stall. In many enterprises, the engine is ready. The roads are not ...

In the world of digital-first business, there is no tolerance for service outages. Businesses know that outages are the quickest way to lose money and customers. For smaller organizations, unplanned downtime could even force the business to close ... A new study from PagerDuty, The State of AI-First Operations, reveals that companies actively incorporating AI into operations now view operational resilience as a growth driver rather than a cost center. But how are they achieving it? ...

In live financial environments, capital markets software cannot pause for rebuilds. New capabilities are introduced as stacked technology layers to meet evolving demands while systems remain active, data keeps moving, and controls stay intact. AI is no exception, and its opportunities are significant: accelerated decision cycles, compressed manual workflows, and more effective operations across complex environments. The constraint isn't the models themselves, but the architectural environments they enter ...

Like most digital transformation shifts, organizations often prioritize productivity and leave security and observability to keep pace. This usually translates to both the mass implementation of new technology and fragmented monitoring and observability (M&O) tooling. In the era of AI and varied cloud architecture, a disparate observability function can be dangerous. IT teams will lack a complete picture of their IT environment, making it harder to diagnose issues while slowing down mean time to resolve (MTTR). In fact, according to recent data from the SolarWinds State of Monitoring & Observability Report, 77% of IT personnel said the lack of visibility across their on-prem and cloud architecture was an issue ...