Insurance company simplifies m&a complexity, improves network reliability and enables cloud expansion

Summary

A leading national title company has provided title insurance and escrow solutions to protect property rights – one of life’s biggest investments – for individuals, businesses and government agencies for over 100 years. The firm is one of the largest, oldest and most respected title insurance companies in the United States. It operates in all 50 states, several US territories and multiple Canadian provinces. With more than several thousand employees, it works with real estate professionals, lenders and industry experts through hundreds of branch and subsidiary offices and thousands of independent title agents to deliver safe and efficient real estate transactions . The company has grown largely through mergers and acquisitions (M&As). This growth has added complexity in managing network and IP space across five company affiliates, some of which are managed separately while others require combined network operations. Adding further complexity are the disparate systems, tools and teams which impact the availability of accurate, timely data needed for positive customer experiences and agile delivery of new products and solutions. The company is investing heavily in its DevSecOps capabilities and its hybrid, multi-cloud technologies to develop and rapidly deploy innovative solutions to improve customer experience, efficiency and capability in the title insurance industry. The firm’s IT team understands the strategic value and importance of DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI) in addressing its network challenges and cloud initiatives. The company engaged Infoblox to modernize and simplify its core network services and enable its migration to the cloud. Given its widely distributed branch network, migration to a decentralized DNS/DHCP architecture, powered by cloud-managed BloxOne DDI, provides the direct Internet access, local survivability, performance and lower cost the company is seeking. The company is leveraging Infoblox’s existing integrations with hybrid and multi-cloud platforms like Azure and Terraform, and APIs for ServiceNow and Fortinet to deliver a better experience while accelerating innovation, app deployment, ROI and time-to-value.

Situation

M&A complexity, disruptions and inefficiency
Like Many Companies Growing Businesses Through M&As, the Firm Expanded Operations on a Progressively Acquired Network of Disparate Platforms and Equipment Across Its Geographically Distributed Environment (See Figure 1). Over Time, This Scenario Resulted in Adverse Customer Service Impacts, Disrupted Operations, Workflow Processing Issues and Network Inefficiencies That Hindered Visibility, Consistency and Development. Without a Modernized, Enterprise-grade Platform, the Existing Network Was Unable to Provide Unified Visibility, Required Redundancy and Resiliency, and Efficient Network Services To Branch Offices. In an Increasingly Competitive Market Driven by Expanding Cloud Services, the Organization’s Network Was Not Cloud-ready and Could Not Support Network Integrations With Existing and Targeted Platforms. A Change Was Needed, So the Company Contacted Infoblox, the Market Leader in Unified Core Network and Security Services.

Challenge

Upgrade customer experience and agility on an enterprise-grade, multi-cloud platform
Because companies in the title insurance business differentiate themselves on the basis of customer service and innovative products, the IT team needed to modernize its network to deliver better customer experience and business agility. Service, operations and innovation depend on a highly-available network that delivers consistency, business performance and continuity—experiences the company could not reliably deliver with its existing platform.
Manual Processes: The company’s infrastructure was built on Microsoft Windows Server providing DNS and DHCP for two business divisions through a primary and a secondary data center, along with services running in the cloud. The IT team manages 1,500 network devices and over 20K active devices. Processes were manual, error-prone and inefficient. IT needed to simplify, centralize and integrate its M&A-impacted network by replacing its outdated ORION IPAM and Microsoft DNS Management platform with an enterprise-grade solution.

Asset Discovery: Supporting IT’s goal of customer experience and business agility was the need for unified visibility and automated IP resource management for on-prem, private/hybrid- and public/multi-cloud environments. The firm sought to eliminate its static IPs and automate IP provisioning for network consistency. The organization’s existing platform did not offer Layer-2 (L2) and Layer-3 (L3) asset discovery and synchronization – essential for running a centralized authoritative repository of IP addresses and scopes within a multi-tenant enterprise. This deficiency highlighted the need for authoritative IPAM and IP lifecycle management for faster, more resilient synchronization across the company.

DNS/DHCP: Consistent with the customer experience and DevSecOps business agility objective, the company also wanted to minimize the risks of DNS and DHCP outages, so the IT team specified an enterprise-grade internal DNS and DHCP solution along with external DNS and advanced DDoS protection to defend against DNS attacks. It also needed to serve its branch offices to provide direct Internet access, local survivability, performance and lower cost.

Traffic Management: Network traffic load balancing was also a gap in the existing platform. IT needed to manage app uptime, network traffic volumes and to ensure server availability and performance. It needed a built-in Disaster Recovery (DR) solution to backup, rebuild and restore its environment in the event of a catastrophic failure. Further, it could solve its problem of quickly configuring, testing and deploying new apps and services to better enable customer experience and accelerate agility, app time-to-value and improved process efficiency.

Cloud and Integrations: Lastly, IT wanted to migrate more services to the cloud and be available through the marketplace without operating system dependencies and the need to modify scripts. At the same time, it wanted services to be available across multiple cloud vendors to avoid lock-in to a specific set of features or services. It had to be environment agnostic to enable full visibility and control into all cloud environments, private/ hybrid and public/multi-cloud, through a single control plane. To support network availability, it specified failover to the cloud to enable active/active redundancy between on-prem and cloud environments. Its DevSecOps team could further improve efficiency and time-to-value through out-of-the box integrations with Azure, Terraform, ServiceNow and Splunk along with the ability to integrate existing technologies including Nessus, Tenable, SolarWinds and its Network Access Control (NAC) platforms.

Solution

Network visibility, reliability, integrations and multi-cloud expansion
The firm has high standards for serving its customers, partners and markets, and is committed to innovation and industry leadership. With Infoblox, it engaged the market-leader with decades of mission-critical reliability and the industry’s most robust and comprehensive solutions for unified network and security management:

Core DDI: Infoblox DDI simplified the complexities of M&A acquired networks by centralizing, integrating and automating DDI protocols to ensure network uptime, redundancy and resiliency. The company specified high-availability (HA) DHCP failover for geographic redundancy. It also required DNS caching, secure recursive DNS services for outbound queries and separate external DNS servers for increased DNS separation and security. The firm specified Advanced DNS Protection (ADP) to guard against DDoS and other malicious inbound and outbound DNS attacks. Since Infoblox is platform agnostic, it solved the company’s visibility problems using its single control plane user interface for a unified, multi-tenant view across network boundaries. Network Insight and Cloud Network Automation enabled full L2 and L3 hybrid, multi-cloud discovery into a synchronized, authoritative IP database serving as a centralized repository for network metadata. Infoblox’s rule and policy management, OS hardening, and backend synchronization streamlined management and processes resulting in greater network consistency, efficiency, uptime, automated protocol management and control.

Distributed DDI: The company’s widely distributed branch network called for Infoblox’s ability to deploy DNS/DHCP at the network edge. Fortunately, BloxOne DDI provides local Internet access, improved service performance and local survivability over Microsoft Active Directory, while lowering overall distributed network costs.

Traffic Management, DR and Reporting: Infoblox’s DNS Traffic Control (DTC) solved the company’s traffic management gap with a global server load balancing (GSLB) solution using intelligent DNS routing based on server health status, geolocation and Extensible Attributes (customizable metatags). It also saved time, effort and cost by automating Disaster Recovery (DR) with less IT intervention, simplifying the workflow for backing-up, rebuilding and restoring the network in the event of a catastrophic failure. Reporting and Analytics were added to include pre-built and customizable summary and granular reports, on-demand search, scheduled and role-based visibility to see and share network information across the ecosystem.

Cloud Services: Hybrid and multi-cloud migration was one of the company’s key priorities for improving customer experience, expanding business agility and managing cost. To ensure network availability, the firm specified a failover-to-cloud option so that on-prem services could be configured for active-active redundancy if needed. As a Microsoft shop, IT liked Infoblox’s existing vNIOS Azure integration, but it also wanted available integrations with other public clouds to avoid vendor lock-in. Infoblox’s vNIOS for AWS, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI) provided the company with flexibility to plan its public, multi-cloud expansion strategy across different cloud regions, group them to provide services as a unified entity and see everything through a single control plane. Finally, Infoblox’s cloud marketplace presence met the IT team’s need for cloud-ready solutions that could be consumed through the cloud marketplace without vendor OS dependencies or the need to modify scripts.

Network Integrations: The company’s modernization strategy called for automation and integrations to leverage existing technologies and drive ROI. DevOps teams were very pleased with Infoblox‘s broad integrations and compatibility with Terraform Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) along with existing ITSM, infrastructure tools (Splunk, ServiceNow, Fortinet, GSS-TSIG, ESXi, Hyper-V, KVM, MS-DNS), and robust open RESTful APIs for business visibility, operations and future platform expansion.

Results

Network visibility, reliability, integrations and multi-cloud expansion

With its Infoblox platform, the firm was able to simplify its M&A network complexity, modernize for uptime and reliability, solve on-prem, hybrid and multi-cloud discovery and visibility needs, and establish HA and DR for redundancy and resiliency. Infoblox enabled local branch internet access, performance and survivability while lowering cost using BloxOne DDI. It further solved traffic management and reporting gaps while empowering cloud initiatives with integrated private/hybrid- and public/multi-cloud solutions. Finally, it supported DevSecOps integrations for existing and future orchestration and automation. These capabilities provide the company with the visibility, automation and control needed to ensure safe, accurate and efficient real estate transactions for customers, affiliates and staff throughout North America, extended locations and to any customer in need of safe, innovative property and title insurance.