We used something else that does almost the same thing. It provided us with the ability to block DNS. We have been doing this for the past 20 years or so. We switched to BloxOne because it's cloud-based. Logging is easier. With all of the previous systems that we had, we had to sacrifice on the logging feature, reduce the logging, because we couldn't maintain that size of a log. With BloxOne, logging is in the cloud and it's not limited. Also, somebody else is maintaining it, which we like.

At this company, we did not switch to this product from another solution. We implemented it to simplify our architecture and to obtain the security features.

The closest thing that I have experience with is OpenDNS, which is Cisco's Umbrella, and they're not really comparable once you get past being able to resolve DNS. I have not done a head-to-head comparison between these products so I don't know whether BloxOne detects threats that Cisco Umbrella cannot. However, I know that BloxOne finds threats that our firewalls are not able to register.

Infoblox, as a whole, has been able to allow our SecOps teams to better manage data coming in and out of our network. Before, they had to do a lot of that work manually using several different systems to manage that traffic. Now, all traffic is sent to a logging system, then that logging system parses all that data and spits out things that may need attention.

Infoblox is more expensive than Palo Alto.

Cisco Umbrella is more flexible and a very good competitor.

Previously, we were just using Palo Alto Firewalls, but we weren't doing any DNS filtering. scanning, or protection with it.

We got BloxOne Threat Defense because we really wanted the layer that Infoblox offered and integrated. We were already using Infoblox DNS, so adding Infoblox DNS Security was simple.

We did not use any other solution.

BloxOne has enabled our monitoring, detection, and response processes. We didn't have such a solution previously. Before using Infoblox, we didn't know.

When it comes to the DDI side of things, we now can work more granularly. We have a more controlled way of doing DNS resolutions. Before, we used Microsoft DNS and Microsoft DHCP, and those Microsoft products don't have the features that Infoblox has.

The main benefit of the Microsoft built-in solutions is that they are free of charge because they are part of the operating system. The main con is they don't have the feature set that Infoblox has. 

Before Infoblox, we used to have a management solution called BlueCat, which worked well but didn't scale like Infoblox. They also didn't have the feature set available. 

BloxOne can detect threats that cannot be detected by the other security tools that we have evaluated. Previously, we didn't have this threat analysis at all.

We previously had Windows DNS. It wasn't robust enough. I don't know the specifics of why it wasn't that good, but I know it didn't work for us.

I have experience with several firewall vendors including F10, Infoblox, Palo Alto, Cisco ACI, ASUS, and Nexus.