5 Key Considerations for Modern DDI

DDI is often the term used to describe a management solution which focuses on DNS (Domain Name System), DHCP (Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol), and IPAM (IP Address Management). Modern DDI is a sustainable network management solution that will grow with you no matter what kind of operational model you’re using.

A new year is always a good time to go back to basics and understand what we want out of our lives, our careers, and our network management systems. Sustainability is key when considering a new solution because it helps us get the most out of our current assets while making it easier to migrate to new ones.

1. Centralized Access Control for Multi-Vendor Architectures

Enterprise companies are already working in a multi-site and often a multicloud operational model. This means they're also working in a multi-vendor architecture when it comes to their DDI. Likely using Microsoft or ISC on-premises and/or within VPCs, public cloud services, and even external services. Having one place to manage permissions easily and even sync with current authentication systems makes the environment more secure and simpler to manage. It also allows teams to only give permissions where necessary, for example you can keep your servers secure by not adding unnecessary permissions directly on the servers.

2. Software Overlay for Consistent Workflows

Software overlays, or abstraction solutions, offer several benefits in any operational model, especially those that are multicloud or multi-vendor. They're easily upgradeable and give users centralized control and visibility over their entire DDI infrastructure, even over other DDI management products from other vendors. One overlooked benefit, though, is the ability to create consistent workflows no matter where workloads reside (on-premises or in the public cloud). The more consistent networks and sites are configured, the more stable and easy to troubleshoot they become.

3. IP Address Management and Organization

Organizations often look for DDI solutions because they're simply trying to find a better way to do IPAM. Using spreadsheets is not a sustainable enterprise grade IPAM solution. However, IP management needs to go further to organization and simplifying operations. A modern DDI solutions will allow for custom searchable fields, validate IP address usage in multiple ways, and simply slice and dice IP information appropriately for each user. This gives an organization an IP database they can always count on.

4. Centralized History and Audit Trails

Come for the IPAM, stay for the Access Control and Audit Trails. When using native tools for DNS and DHCP it's nearly impossible to keep track of what changes were made and when. It means searching through logs, often on several different servers, maybe dozens or hundreds in the case of large enterprises. This is not sustainable. In modern DDI solutions you should be able to easily click on any object from one location and find the history. There should be information not only on what change was made and when, but also who made the change and why.

5. Simplified Lifecycle Management

Working with a vendor who understands that you're going to have multiple vendors in your environment will lead to solutions that will work within those ecosystems. This means being able to do everything in the API that you can do in other interfaces. With modern DDI you can bring new services to market faster and sunset old ones safely and effectively because of the seamless integration with other orchestration and ticketing systems.

Give Micetro a Spin

Micetro is a sustainable, modern DDI solution from Men&Mice. It offers simplified Role-Based Access Control as well as Single-Sign-On supported by any authentication framework using SAML 2.0. Micetro will also allow you to integrate with Microsoft Active Directory and DNS/DHCP snap-ins without having to install an agent on your Microsoft servers.

Men&Mice have been around for 30 years, but are constantly innovating and evolving the DDI solution, Micetro. Micetro is a pure software overlay solution which can be used on-premises or in the cloud, giving companies the flexibility they need with multicloud becoming ubiquitous and SASE just around the corner.

Organize and optimize your DHCP and IPAM easily and even get suggestions on which IP addresses are free to use next within a range withiout having to parse through spreadsheets or even navigate to other tabs.

View the history of all the changes which have been made to any object in the Micetro database easily by hovering over an object and clicking View History. In the case of outages or other network issues you can easily find recent changes made to DNS, DHCP, or IPAM by clicking on the Recently Created or Recently Modified buttons.

Finally enjoy the robust APIs offered by Micetro, which has Swagger built right into the backend. This allows you to test one-off API calls right in the browser, making it easy to add workflows to other orchestration and ticketing systems like ServiceNow, Ansible, Terraform, or even your custom scripts.

For more information, ask for a live demo! https://menandmice.com/live-demo