Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense Reviews

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. 

From an Infoblox perspective, it's interesting because it is pretty much about dedicated security-focused customers who are looking for advanced technology. It wouldn't be suitable for a customer who hasn't addressed their web security or firewall needs. 

So it's mainly targeted toward larger enterprise customers, and there are only a handful of the customers who are for Infoblox in New Zealand.

Picking the most valuable feature is like asking what your favorite color is. It depends on what problem you're trying to solve for a customer. If a customer has a specific requirement regarding DNS security, then they would consider Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense. If they are looking for a data lake, they might explore other options. It really depends on the exact needs of the customer. It's all dependent on the customer's requirements and the specific use case.

You wouldn't sell it to a customer who only has five to ten users. It's meant for customers with a large IP base and a strong cybersecurity posture. Infoblox BloxOne Threat Defense furthers the existing security posture rather than replacing or trying to replace any existing products. It supplements what you already have. You can't supplement something that you don't have in the first place. It's going to integrate with your existing systems, such as your security tools, data sources, and firewalls.

From a technical perspective, it's a good product. It performs its intended functions well. 

However, from a channel perspective, it would be beneficial to have a scaled-down version for partners or customers who may not have the enterprise-level scale but still want to enjoy the benefits of the solution.

I have been working with it hands-on since about September last year. I use the latest version.

From what I understand, it is fairly stable. I haven't heard any complaints about it.

From a scalability perspective, it scales high, so I would rate it a ten. However, it doesn't scale down well; that's a problem. I work with businesses of all sizes, depending on their needs.

The initial setup is not a simple "click-click-next" installation. It requires some level of experience and technical know-how. So the installation process is quite challenging. 

The time taken to install the solution could be days because it is a project-based installation. So it's not like a firewall where you can simply set it up and start monitoring. It would involve several days or even professional services consulting, depending on the specific requirements of the customer.

From my perspective, I have two engineers dedicated to the implementation process. But the number of engineers required can vary. It depends on the complexity and size of the project. It could take longer if you have a larger team working on it.

When it comes to maintenance, from an advanced enterprise perspective, you would typically have an entire team dedicated to your security posture. So you would have a team behind the maintenance of the solution.

It's a pricey solution because it's for the advanced kind of customer. It's not gonna be cheap. I would rate the pricing a seven out of ten, where one is cheap and ten is expensive. The pricing model is on an annual basis. There are additional costs for support.

I would advise understanding what problem you are trying to solve. That's the key. Overall, I would rate it 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.