Kroschke sign-international Takes IT Security to the Next Level with Cloud DDI and Security Solution

THE CHALLENGE

Strengthening the Network Against Growing Threats
There is a real fear of cyber attacks in business and rightly so: The number of attacks is growing and companies that do not protect themselves risk losing sensitive data and incurring significant costs. Kroschke sign-international experienced firsthand how dangerous attacks like this can be. The company fell victim to a hacker attack and lost all virtual machines and its DNS and DHCP functionality as a result. Kroschke was already planning to modernize its outdated network management and to increase its security, but the hacker attack made it abundantly clear that its previous Microsoft DNS and DHCP solution and manual management of data and IP addresses using a company-owned wiki was not only outdated but also risky.

“We became painfully aware of how easy it is to tap data externally via DNS. Without DNS, we were simply lost. The hacker incident made it instantly crucial for us to ensure we had robust protection and to use DNS properly, once and for all,” says Björn-Christian Schmidt, Team Leader of IT Infrastructure at Kroschke sign-international. He and his 10-member team are responsible for IT at Braunschweig and the company’s Sinsheim site.

Maximum Security with Hybrid Cloud Network
After the hacking incident, the team got down to business and started looking for a suitable new network security solution. Following a recommendation, Kroschke sign-international looked at Infoblox’s solutions and was immediately won over. It was impressed by the user interface, intuitive handling, and above all, the high availability provided by the hybrid network architecture. With Infoblox’s DDI and BloxOne Threat Defense, Kroschke is now able to link virtual and physical environments across locations and guarantee 360-degree protection and resilience.

THE SOLUTION

Stronger Network Operations and Security with Infoblox
Infoblox enabled Kroschke sign-international to achieve its goal in full and replace its wiki-based solution with a powerful and comprehensive DDI solution from Infoblox, getting DNS traffic under control and automating it. With the Infoblox solution, all DNS, DHCP, and IPAM services can now be managed uniformly, and all the relevant network information is visible and available. Additionally, with Infoblox’s BloxOne Threat Defense package, the company now has the network security it needs—and without too much work for the IT team. The new network architecture also protects mobile devices, which have increasingly been used at Kroschke sign-international since the pandemic. As a result, the company can now use apps without a second thought and the team is reassured to know that the DNS traffic running through them is secure. “Infoblox solutions are above and beyond the Microsoft solutions we used previously and they are perfectly attuned to how we work,” says Schmidt, summarizing the benefits.

“Security First”: The Order of the Day

Kroschke sign-international attached great importance to pursuing a cloud-first strategy for the future, but also, crucially, to making security a top priority. For the company, this goal includes regularly putting its security to the test. After implementing Infoblox’s security solution, a gray-box test conducted by the IT team revealed no DNS vulnerabilities. For Kroschke, this finding was confirmation that choosing to go with Infoblox was absolutely the right decision. The company will continue to use special software to simulate ransomware attacks, for example, so that it tests its own security. “For us, trust is good, and monitoring is better—and we do trust Infoblox 100 percent. Sadly, we’ve had our fingers burnt, so we will continue to evaluate our security from now on,” says Schmidt.

THE RESULT

A Real Success Story
Even though Kroschke sign-international remains alert, it no longer considers the DNS and IPAM situation as critical as it was before Infoblox was involved. The newfound network transparency has given the company back its security. Schmidt finds Infoblox’s cloud DDI and security solution sophisticated but easy to use. He also wants to train his team to use the solutions to their full potential going forward.

Infoblox experts are always on hand to provide advice and support. The close, personal, and professional partnership they offer is particularly appreciated by Kroschke sign-international. The network infrastructure changeover with Infoblox was the fastest IT project ever implemented by the company, and Schmidt attributes this primarily to the excellent teamwork with everyone involved; the chemistry between the two companies was right from the start. “From the first sales contact to making the decision and implementing it and on to the all-round technical support from the partner Infoblox recommended, everything ran like clockwork,” sums up Schmidt, who likes to implement projects quickly. “The fact that the entire changeover of all virtual machines and physical components took less than two days and was completed without any downtime really impressed us. It also made quite a few waves internally. All in all, it was a real success story.”