How DDI Technology Can Benefit Your Business

by Marty Aquino
How DDI Technology Can Benefit Your Business

Time is a critical part of your organization’s success, whether it means saving time or preventing it from being wasted with mediocre — or worse, nonadvancing — projects. DDI technology is an effective method of streamlining multiple necessary network components and creating a more robust management solution. DDI technologies are often overlooked by organizations. As a result, DDI typically only gets attention when something goes awry. According to BlueCat Networks:

  • Companies using a commercial DDI solution show a direct correlation to their networking team’s overall success.
  • Ironically, the adoption of commercial DDI solutions is inversely proportional to the business size and IT budget — with the threshold around $1 billion.
  • Organizations using software-defined networking and hybrid-cloud environments are more likely to incorporate commercial DDI solutions.

Standard decentralized DDI solutions become increasingly difficult to implement as your organization grows. The built-in complexity of managing multiple systems across high-performing global or regional networks becomes cumbersome rather quickly. This often results in your network teams becoming overwhelmed by the sheer volume of service requests. Strong DDI optimization not only opens up opportunities for growth by more effectively allocating key individuals but also streamlines your organization’s resources.

What Is DDI Technology?

DDI is a master acronym that stands for DNS, DHCP and IPAM:

DNS: Domain Name System

When computers engage with each other, they use numeric addresses, known as an internet protocol (IP) address. The DNS serves as a translator for its users and converts these numeric addresses, like 20.62.72.11, to the much simpler “MigusGroup.com.”

Many larger organizations have countless internet protocol IP addresses each linking to a specific hardware network.

DHCP: Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol

DHCP is like an air traffic control officer assigning IP addresses and related data to each host on a network. The idea is to simplify the IP management and allow end users to interact more efficiently.

IPAM: Internet Protocol Address Management

IPAM is a solution set designed to help your organization’s administrators organize, track, and even adjust data as it pertains to a network’s IP address. Companies use this to prevent duplicate addresses, identify addresses assigned to specific devices and keep internal IP addresses lists updated.

How Sub-Optimal DDI creates Resource- and Time-Vacuums

At the beginning of the internet age, IP addresses were manually assigned and were tracked on spreadsheets. Fast forward to the age of AI, chatbots and machine learning where larger-scale networks simply won’t function properly without a strong IPAM and cyber resiliency solution set. Many organizations have hundreds or thousands of devices on their networks — each one with a precise IP address. The larger or faster your company grows, the more widespread this problem becomes. Interestingly, this unprofitable time-vacuum can be mitigated or even prevented by working with trusted partners — but is generally made worse by doubling-down on monolithic thinking internally.

DHCP was designed to help; however, it works slightly differently when subject to larger networks. When any device joins your network, it will ask for an IP address from your DHCP server. The dynamically assigned IP address doesn’t last forever and will change periodically as predetermined time expires or is renewed. Further complicating matters, devices moving from subnet to subnet must change IP addresses at each occurrence. The classic tracking spreadsheets can easily get desynchronized with your network absurdly fast. According to BlueCat:

  • Simple, easy-to-make, single-character errors and typos can stop an entire network.
  • Web-based spreadsheets often lack automation and double-verification to keep IP addresses error-free.
  • Internal solutions like spreadsheet automation require code development, resources and time.

These tasks take your otherwise productive administrators and relegates them to time consuming activities — that even when done right, only keep with the status quo. In other words, they’re not proactive activities. The larger your organization, the more devices will vary on your network by the minute. Titania, specialists in accurate network security, reports:

  • Exploitable network misconfiguration cost organizations 9% of total annual revenue.
  • 75% of organizations rely on compliance to deliver security. However, findings from the survey show a decline in maintaining full compliance with regulated data security standards.
  • Misconfigurations cost organizations millions.

Further, critical and overlooked risks can lay dormant on your network for months or years between audits. This leaves your organization unnecessarily vulnerable.

How You Can Benefit From DDI Optimization

DDI technology optimization gives your organization a leading advantage over your competition. This relatively nascent market is growing at a rapid pace; according to Markets and Markets:

  • The global DDI market is projected to be worth $836 million by 2026 -a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.9%
  • The increasing need for IPAM and the transition from IPv4 to IPv6 are accelerating DDI market growth.

The rapid growth also connotes that the market is not yet saturated with effective DDI solution sets. Those organizations on the earlier adopter side of the adoption bell curve will have a distinct advantage over their peers by enabling communication across all points of their networks — while your competitors using classic IP spreadsheets will be effectively running frantically just to stay in place.

Incorporating commercial DDI solutions has a clear correlation to the success of a networking team. The efficiency is significantly amplified and appreciated by your networking teams because there is a “single source of truth to ensure network integrity and automated processes to speed up service delivery.” The complexity of your system requires a specialized touch. It simply doesn’t make sense, in the vast majority of cases, to create and implement internal workarounds when effective solution platform providers already exist.

Your organization’s success is similar to a multivehicle convoy. The speed of the convoy is held back by the slowest vehicles in line. DDI technology optimization is not for the faint of heart, given the potential innumerable complexities involved. Remove the resource-draining DDI networking issues from your organization. Connect with The Migus Group and start using a centralized, automated and secure DDI solution set to separate your organization from your competitors and elevate your network to greater heights.


Marty Aquino has been a passionate writer on venture capital, technology, forecasting, risk mitigation, wealth and entrepreneurial topics since 2009. He is the founder of Carbonwolf Energy, a venture-capital firm specializing in world-changing and status-quo-defying technologies and people.


Sources