What DOD’s JEDI Cloud Contract Means for Your DNS
This is the second installment in a four-part series on the JEDI cloud. Come for the knowledge, stay for the Star Wars references.
Key takeawaysThis key takeaway was generated through LLMs crawling the page and coming up with an overview of the content.The article discusses migration challenges DOD agencies may face moving into a hybrid environment after Microsoft won the JEDI cloud contract, focusing on DNS visibility and control. It explains how decentralized DNS management creates blind spots—spreadsheets, sticky notes, and manual processes—that complicate resource tracking across on-prem and cloud and increase operational risk. The piece recommends adopting a single Adaptive DNS architecture (specifically BlueCat's Adaptive DNS) to provide a centralized point of truth, improve visibility into east-west traffic, reduce shadow IT, and simplify infrastructure management prior to migration.
Why is visibility important for DNS during a DoD cloud migration?
Visibility is crucial because hybrid environments split resources between on-prem and cloud, which makes it difficult to track assets without a centralized view. Decentralized DNS management produces blind spots where administrators rely on ad hoc methods like spreadsheets or sticky notes, preventing a single point of truth for resource management. Ensuring visibility—through an Adaptive DNS architecture—lets teams quickly understand DNS behavior, identify east-west traffic, and detect unapproved compute or shadow IT before these issues compromise security or complicate the migration process.
What problems can arise from decentralized DNS management in a hybrid environment?
Decentralized DNS management leads to disorganization and operational friction because there is no unified source for resource information across the enterprise. Administrators may resort to manual tracking methods, which create blind spots and make it difficult to know where compute resources are deployed or whether those deployments were authorized. These blind spots allow shadow IT to go unnoticed, increasing the risk of unmonitored entry points and security vulnerabilities, and they complicate infrastructure management during and after migration to the cloud.
How does BlueCat's Adaptive DNS help mitigate migration and security risks?
BlueCat’s Adaptive DNS provides a centralized DNS architecture that serves as a single pane of glass for administrators to both see and control DNS resources. With this centralized control, teams can detect east-west traffic patterns and identify unauthorized or shadow IT deployments that might otherwise go unnoticed. By establishing control and visibility before migrating DNS to the JEDI cloud, agencies can avoid infrastructure management issues, reduce security exposure from unmonitored entryways, and streamline the overall migration process.
Now that Microsoft has won the big DOD JEDI cloud contract, we’re looking ahead to the migration process and the challenges DOD agencies are likely to face as they try to move into a hybrid environment.
A lack of visibility becomes very noticeable
Visibility plays a very important role in DNS. Most network administrators want “a single pane of glass”, where they can get a sense of what’s going on with their DNS quickly and easily. This is especially important when network resources are stretched between on-prem and cloud environments, where trying to keep track of resources can quickly become complicated, leaving blind spots.
What do we mean by blind spots? With decentralized DNS management systems, there is no single point of truth for resource management across the enterprise. Administrators use spreadsheets, sticky notes, or other manual processes to keep track of assets – overall, this can become very disorganized and frustrating. These problems can be avoided by working under one Adaptive DNS architecture.
You discover how much control over your network you have
In this case, having the ability to see your DNS resources goes hand in hand with having the ability to control them. Issues can arise when, for example, compute is deployed without getting the go-ahead from the system administrator or someone in a similar role (this is also known as shadow IT). This can go unnoticed for quite some time, and security may be compromised by these new, unmonitored entryways. However, if the system is visible with BlueCat’s Adaptive DNS, east-west traffic can quickly be seen and subsequently dealt with.
If your DNS is migrated to the JEDI cloud without the proper controls in place, you can run into unpleasant infrastructure management issues. It’s much simpler (and will save you plenty of trouble in the long run) if you have control over your network before a migration, so a centralized DNS is key here as well. A good general doesn’t just let their troops fly off to battle before ensuring communications and commands are in place, right?
Hilary has worked as a copywriter in digital advertising and the FinTech startup world. She is now working as a Digital Copywriter at BlueCat and learning more every day.
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