Network Management

Our partner: Infoblox

DDI stands for DNS, DHCP and IP Address Management. A DDI solution centralizes the management of just these core network services and unifies the management of IP addresses, address ranges, and any resource records and objects.

The complexity of a network infrastructure increases substantially as an organization grows. This complicates the management of the core network services DNS and DHCP. Without a functioning DNS system, all communication on the network breaks down. If the DHCP service fails, clients can no longer access the network.

Closely related to DNS and DHCP is IP address management. Manual maintenance and management of IP address information no longer makes sense once a network reaches a certain size. The effort as well as the probability of errors increases with the complexity of a network.

With our DDI management solution, administrators gain visibility and control over the network infrastructure. Network resource management is simplified to the maximum. Configuration errors when using tables for management of IP addresses are completely avoided. Our solutions help you simplify many tasks and run a fail-safe, efficient and low-maintenance system.

• Simplify network resource management
• Preserve operational availability and mission-critical systems
• IPv4, IPv6 and dual stack available
• Monitoring of network resources
• Saving time in managing mission-critical services
• Security through the use of additional modules (DNS Firewall, ADP, BloxOne Threat Defence, etc.)

Our partners: Infoblox, Tufin

Change is an enduring constant in the workplace, especially in the age of digital transformation. Restructuring, business process adjustments and process efficiencies all impact IT.

Network infrastructure, as the dynamic backbone of an enterprise, is changing every day: Capturing new VLANs on the switch, adjusting the ruleset on the firewall or implementing new systems. It is time-consuming to maintain the appropriate structure for often chaotic change processes in organizations.

By using our change management tools, you can keep track of configuration changes and immediately identify the cause in the event of a failure. In doing so, handwritten documentation or manual upkeep is a thing of the past.

Sidarion offers you tools for automatic configuration monitoring and backup, linking changes in the configuration to the request in the (existing) change management system.

• Easily compare historical and current configurations
• Traceability of implemented changes
• Source of the changes

Our partners: Macmon, Infoblox

How well do you know your network infrastructure? Are you familiar with the small switch in the test environment? What port is it connected to? What you can’t see can hurt. Network Discovery is a process that exposes and simplifies the connectivity and intercommunication between network devices on a private network.

It consolidates all your network infrastructure and service data into a single, comprehensive and reliable database. You are thus able to retrieve information about the devices, the host IP address or about the switch port, among others, in the shortest possible time. The extensive automation, centralized transparency and integrated management functions give you greater agility and control. This enables you to meet the changing needs of your business while achieving significant time and cost savings.

Our partners: Infoblox, Tufin, RedHat, Cumulus Networks

Increasing demands on network technology lead to heightened infrastructure complexity. More and more business processes are going digital. Resource-intensive applications and services or cloud solutions are being implemented and the IT department is challenged. Automating repetitive processes and tasks yields cost and time resource savings. At the same time, productivity is increased, standardization is achieved and auditability is improved.

Automation eliminates tedious repetitive tasks and at the same time reduces the number of errors caused by manual intervention. In addition, with automation, you have the option of making changes across multiple devices simultaneously or speeding up the collection of data. Recurring tasks such as logging in on each individual device, modifying the configuration, saving and downloading are performed automatically.

In addition to automating everyday processes, our partners also offer solutions for security policy orchestration. This is a new model for automated implementation of changes within network infrastructures. Process changes are automated and application and service delivery is accelerated.

Our partners: RedHat, Cumulus Networks, Fortinet, Ansible

In a highly heterogeneous network, with distributed intelligence across devices from different vendors, controlling the components as a whole becomes a challenge. Using SDN reduces the complexity and management overhead of the network. There is a separation between the hardware and the control plane.

The management and control of the network components is done from a central controller (control plane), which has all the intelligence. Accordingly, the hardware is only responsible for forwarding the data packets (data plane) and receives the instructions for its tasks from the controller. The devices function as routers or switches and perform the tasks on layer 3 or layer 2. In addition to switching and routing, other services such as firewalling and load balancing can also be controlled in a software-defined manner. The use of the hardware is manufacturer independent.

The central location of the network intelligence eliminates the need to configure individual devices or operating systems. This minimizes management and maintenance efforts while increasing flexibility and stability.

The use of SDN is particularly interesting for larger environments. However, the use of SDN can also be worthwhile for smaller or medium-sized companies.

Refercence projekt of Sidarion: SDN in the financial sector

Even in the financial sector, it is important to keep IT costs low and employee efficiency high, while maintaining quality. For a Swiss bank, we were engaged to renew the switching environment, and we relied on open source products such as Cumulus, Ansible and Netbox.

Netbox is considered the source-of-truth and provides the requirements for the infrastructure via an API. With Ansible, these requirements are queried and distributed to the network infrastructure. CumulusLinux on EdgeCore switches has proven to be a very good platform for this.

The result is a layer 2 infrastructure configurable via a central GUI that is easy to use, has automated validation, and is free of configuration errors. As a nice side effect, there is no need to document the network, as the current configuration of all switches can be viewed with a few clicks. The code is freely available at https://github.com/Sidarion/netbox-joined-inventory.

Our partners: Riverbed, Fortinet

Limited WAN bandwidth repeatedly causes data transmission bottlenecks. By means of network traffic management applications, this problem can be mitigated.

Traffic management systems enable the monitoring and optimization of IP networks. They analyze all data traffic and ensure that prioritized or time-critical applications such as Citrix and VoIP receive the bandwidth they need. Integrated solutions also include functions such as data compression, traffic shaping and data traffic optimization. This allows the transmission speed – and consequently the available bandwidth – to be significantly increased, resulting in a sustainable reduction in network costs. In addition, extensive monitoring and reporting functions create a high degree of transparency and thus help to optimize the management of the network infrastructure.

So-called Unified Performance Management (UP) systems contain an integral set of functions that address the following needs:

• Providing visibility and control of bandwidth allocation and prioritization of urgent and critical applications
• Metering and deprioritisation of non-time-critical traffic
• Detection and blocking of non-essential and/or security-critical traffic
• Compression of traffic
• Acceleration of data traffic or reduction of transmission-related delays and wait times
• Reservation of bandwidth for defined applications

Our partners: Infoblox, Fortinet

As the technical requirements for your infrastructure increase, so does the risk of external attacks. Maintaining control over a complex network with all its components requires a reliable solution. By using our reporting and analytics solution, you gain insight into the overall picture of your environment. It brings you the reliability and control over your network that you need to make fast and accurate decisions.

The numerous, predefined reports offer a clear and visualized representation of your data. Among other things, they show which user accesses which application and when, and monitor the health of the services, such as DNS and DHCP. The monitoring and measurement of the operational states minimizes the response time of the specialists responsible for the system. The affected system can be identified, and the problem located in the shortest possible time.

The reporting solution also prepares you in the best possible way for upcoming audits. It supports you in enforcing and complying with (company) regulations. Long-term data retention with automated archiving makes audits faster and more accurate. Predefined reports for network audits, IP addresses, device mappings, switch port usage, detected threats and many others, minimize the time needed for audit preparation.