DNS and IPAM are among the most fundamental pillars of a network. Networks are rapidly evolving, following trends in virtualisation, security, cloud, SDN, IPv6, and IoT. At the same time, the increasing demand for applications to be mobile, cloud-based, and highly secure requires significant investments and innovations.
What is DNS?
DNS, the Domain Name System, is the address book of the Internet. It translates billions of requests from names into IP addresses and enables organisations to use brand names, send emails, and access thousands of services in an efficient and seamless way. It also provides the connection between applications and websites.
What is IPAM?
IPAM, or IP Address Management, allows for the tracking and management of the IP addresses in a network. It supports today’s complex technologies by providing advanced and automated tracking of the entire set of devices and services. It also provides visibility into what is connected to the network and increases the efficiency of network management.
It is crucial that both DNS and IPAM services are provided in a way that is efficient, secure and cost-effective. The performance of these services determines the success of network solutions.
Critical core services
Every organisation uses DNS on a daily basis to perform thousands of queries, transforming domain names, which are easy to remember and manage, into IP addresses, which are harder to remember but easily managed by devices. Every time we visit a website, send an email, access the cloud, or use an application, we are querying a DNS server. This service constitutes the basic functionality of every network. It not only supports the hostname to address resolution but also address to hostnames. Without DNS, we would need to type the IP address of the destination server every time we wanted to access a service or visit a website.
When selecting network infrastructure solutions, it is important to provide seamless interoperability with other elements of the network. The exponential growth of the number of devices connected to physical and virtual infrastructures, and private and public clouds makes traditional IPAM tools inefficient, requiring significant manual effort to maintain an up-to-date status of the network, often isolated from DNS.
Studies show that by 2025, there will be around 30.9 billion connected IoT devices worldwide, most of which will be connected to enterprise networks. We can help you to automate and centralise IP address management, handling the most complex situations in conjunction with DNS.
Central management and cloud integration
Today’s complex network infrastructures comprise numerous elements that are distributed on-premise and in the cloud. The number of organisations moving their data centres to the cloud is increasing, together with the demand to comply with complex requirements. Organisations often face a lack of automation, correlated to network provisioning, which causes high complexity and consequently high operating costs. Traditional IPAM solutions lack the ability to provide visibility into cloud networks.
We provide the latest technologies so that you don’t have to manually provision IP addresses and DNS namespaces for devices and interfaces. Our solutions allow centralised management of both on-premise and cloud networks, maximising efficiency and flexibility for both enterprise IT organisations and service providers and making DNS and IPAM services work together in a fully integrated and automated way.
Provide security to critical services
In today’s hostile Internet environment, it is only a matter of time before an organisation’s DNS comes under attack. The original DNS specifications did not include security, leaving it exposed to a variety of attacks. Attackers are exploiting DNS to target organisations precisely because it is easy to exploit. Most enterprise firewalls leave port 53 open to provide DNS services, allowing attackers to evade security policies. The Domain Name System is the ideal target because a successful breach can take the victim offline, effectively bringing businesses to their knees. The risk of not including DNS in an organisation’s security posture is simply too big to take.
There are a number of different types of attacks that exploit DNS, including:
- DDoS to bombard the DNS server with requests, causing downtime for significant periods of time.
- DNS cache poisoning, also referred to as DNS spoofing, allowing attackers to redirect traffic to malicious websites in order to steal credentials and data or to download malicious code.
- DNS tunnelling, exploiting port 53 to push flows of data such as SSH or TCP to transfer malware. Port 53 is rarely monitored due to the nature of the services it serves and the amount of traffic that flows through it.
- Data exfiltration, exploiting the same mechanism as DNS tunnelling attacks, port 53 is used to push data flows over the DNS protocol.
It is crucial for organisations to protect their core network services. We have designed and deployed security solutions, including DNS and IPAM, for many organisations and can help to ensure that you have the right protection mechanisms in place for your business.
Your services as an asset
Almost all IP communications use DNS to resolve a hostname. Traditional DNS and IPAM services are not secure and or optimised to work in modern networks. They require significant and constant manual input to provide an effective service, and yet they leave holes both in terms of security and the visibility of network devices.
DNS and IPAM no longer need to be seen as a duty, but as resources that can help to grow the business and be an effective defensive tool.
Nomios UK provides the network services solutions DNS & IPAM, designed to make your services an asset, reducing costs, optimising your network and keeping your organisation secure.