While technology advancements and evolving business scenarios have rapidly improved the delivery of the DDI services, never before have these core services had to adapt as quickly as they have in preparation for the hybrid future. Organizations are pushing the location boundaries to empower their workforce to work from anywhere, and they need DDI services that are capable of handling this challenge.

The changes of the past several years in how and where organizations work raise a series of critical questions: What does enterprise-grade DDI look like today? How does it facilitate a hybrid future for global businesses? And what does it take to build an enterprise-grade DDI for today’s hybrid networks? While the core features of DDI remain the same—enabling manageable, reliable, centralized network infrastructure—a modern DDI requires certain additional capabilities to sustain the hybrid infrastructure that today’s businesses demand.

Robust Multi-cloud Integrations

Enterprises, especially DevOps teams, have always sought to integrate existing technologies with emerging tools and streamline and automate processes to control costs, improve performance and boost reliability. But today, the need for secure solutions that deliver agility, simplified workflows, integrations and automation has never been more urgent.

Focus on Ease of Management for Users

Advanced customer-centric features that can leverage hybrid core DDI for greater visibility, stronger security and a better user experience are not only essential for reliable infrastructure, but also the workforce behind it. Features such as Access Control Lists (ACLs) enable DNS administrators to define access and permission levels for selected zones and valid domains for better security and control. In a hybrid workplace, these features become essential add-ons for network administrators looking to manage and secure a growing number of remote users.

Enhanced Service Provider Visibility, Control and User Experience

When simplicity is key, additional tools that increase network insight, management capability, and better software experiences for service providers and large enterprises who implement IPv6 are a must. Solutions that provide visibility into IPv6 DHCP requests are a requirement, allowing network teams to provide vendor-specific IPv6 response options, even with multiple DHCP client vendors on the same network. These tools can also allow service providers to better manage crucial IP connections and the cloud-first networking technologies that they use to provide carrier-grade security, five-nines reliability and ultra-low latency.

DDI will remain foundational to the new networking and security paradigms that will catalyze and accelerate the hybrid future—from SD-WAN and zero trust network access (ZTNA) to IoT device visibility and security. With enterprise-grade DDI that is flexible and that leverages cloud-native architecture from the ground up, enterprises can set the foundation for modern edge networking as well as the next generation of distributed cloud computing to confidently take on the hybrid challenges of today and tomorrow.