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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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

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

I've spent a lot of time in the channel, and one thing I keep coming back to is this: a partner program is only as good as what it looks like in the field. Many programs look great on paper, but when a partner is in front of a customer navigating a complex hybrid environment or trying to make the case for AI-powered observability, the gap between what a vendor promises and what it actually delivers becomes very clear, very fast ...

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...