Introducing new deployment options for DNS Edge service points

As businesses scale, network teams have to account for a constant increase in the number of devices connecting to the network. Full utilization of hardware and cloud investments is critical to ensuring fast, reliable, and secure service deployment.

With BlueCat DNS Edge, network teams have visibility and control over all DNS traffic to deploy services faster and meet their network initiatives. BlueCat service points are at the heart of BlueCat DNS Edge, replacing the box model used by other DNS providers.

Up to now, the options for deploying BlueCat service points were as a VM via OVA in ESXi, or through cloud native formats for AWS and Azure.  These virtual machines are managed, automatically upgraded, and monitored from the cloud with zero operational overhead. Service points sit at the first hop of any networking query, providing faster deployment and real-time service delivery.

Sometimes architectural considerations or capital expenditure constraints prevent deployment of service points as VMs.  Our solution?  BlueCat now offers the ability to spin up a DNS Edge service point on most BlueCat DNS/DHCP Server (BDDS) models at no additional cost.

Let’s look at how you can enable DNS Edge capabilities on existing infrastructure without having to re-architect the network.

Take a financial services firm that is managing a new distributed network, with hundreds of remote offices located worldwide. Here are some of the challenges in managing the network connectivity of their remote offices and local branches:

• Limited budget for capital and operational expenditures
• The high cost of running a virtual infrastructure outweighs its benefits
• Lack of on-site IT personnel makes it difficult to deploy new services and changes
• No visibility into the network utilization, spotting network errors, and malicious activity

Once the firm enables DNS Edge on their BlueCat DNS servers, all DNS client traffic pointed to the Service Point’s designated IP address is logged into the DNS Edge cloud as it is resolved. Now the firm can fully utilize existing infrastructure while getting:

• Visibility into network traffic via DNS queries
• Control over geographic routing of queries with lightning resolution

So how do customers enable both DNS Edge capabilities and DNS resolution on the same appliance? It’s as simple as checking a box after configuring some general settings.

Learn more about configuring SP on BDDS with our online documentation.