Network complexity poses a tough challenge for enterprises like Western Digital and Omnicom, which operate across multiple sites and countries. Ensuring that employees in all locations can conveniently access apps and data without delay is essential. At the same time, both companies need to block unauthorised users from accessing their network perimeters.
During Infoblox’s virtual launch event for its Universal DDI platform, Sesh Tirumala, Chief Information Officer of Western Digital, and Alexis Lopez, Managing Director of Global Network Strategy and Operations at Omnicom, discussed how their companies have enhanced networking and security through their partnership with Infoblox.
Scalability challenges
For data storage provider Western Digital, managing a workforce of 50,000 globally is no easy feat, especially regarding networking and security. The company operates 12 factories, four R&D sites, and more than 30 data centres, spanning both collocated and on-premises facilities.
“From an IT infrastructure perspective, we run workloads in our data centre, in the cloud, and at the edge, so control, flexibility, cost, and automation are critical elements of our overall infrastructure,” Tirumala revealed.
Currently, Western Digital is focused on separating the company into two distinct brands — one dedicated to the hard disk drive business and the other to flash drives.
“We need to establish processes, systems, and assets on a global scale to support two large, successful, publicly traded companies. Given that much of our workload is spread across data centres, the cloud, and factories, we need absolute flexibility. From a control, flexibility, and adaptability standpoint, we need solutions that are modern, automated, and secure,” he added.
As a global organisation, Western Digital’s IT team faces constant pressure to provide always-on services. Additionally, the company needed to eliminate IT tickets and reduce manual intervention to achieve true agility.
Meanwhile, Omnicom, a global marketing communications group, has over 300 offices worldwide and three times as many cloud environments. Lopez noted that one of the company’s guiding principles is network simplification — to keep IT service costs as low as possible within the business.
“To achieve this simplification, my top priority is moving everything to the cloud. The reality is that on-prem infrastructure is a burden to the business — managing, configuring, and operating it doesn’t deliver value for our clients. Therefore, the more we can move to the cloud, the better and more effective we can be for our clients,” Lopez said.
Gradual transformation
To enhance Western Digital’s operational efficiency, one of Tirumala’s first steps was to unify the NetOps and the SecOps teams, breaking down silos between networking and security.
“When you focus on outcomes around automation, visibility, and observability to proactively support workloads in the data centre, cloud, and factories, you need a very agile workforce,” he remarked.
To support this transformation, Western Digital leveraged Infoblox’s Universal DDI product suite, gaining overall comprehensive visibility across its network.
Meanwhile, Omnicom participated in Infoblox’s Early Access Program, which allowed them to preview code, test in their lab, and provide feedback before the general availability release of all Infoblox products.
“Our experience with the Early Access Program has been great. The visibility we achieved for our on-premises and cloud infrastructure isn’t available on any other platform today. Within 30 minutes of integrating asset insights into our environment, we discovered 130,000 assets,” Lopez shared.
According to Lopez, the ability to simplify and reduce complexity in any environment depends on understanding what assets are in place and how they’re deployed. Infoblox Universal Asset Insights was essential in helping Omnicom visualise its environments through a simple, intuitive interface that enhanced the company’s capacity for data-driven decision-making.
As Omnicom migrated assets to the cloud, managing the IP space became a considerable challenge. Although the company initially kept everything in Infoblox and wrote scripts to automate the allocation of new IP spaces, visualising these assets remained a concern, Lopez noted.
“When we configured Infoblox Universal Asset Insights and integrated it into our cloud environments, we could finally see the full span of assets and their configurations, which brought everything together,” he continued.
Forward mindset
For Western Digital, there is no going back to outdated ways of doing business, especially if those methods hinder innovation and progress.
“Our path forward is to automate, automate, and automate. This way, there’s no need for tickets in any processes, we maintain the right security posture, and we have auditability. From an employee perspective, this approach ensures scalability,” Tirumala pointed out.
Automation remains a priority for Omnicom as well, along with simplification — using the best solutions in the most effective ways and streamlining processes to support that.
“The ability to integrate new businesses into our technology ecosystem is essential for bringing new capabilities to our clients. It’s important to unify these services quickly, as the inability to work or collaborate on interconnected systems limits our ability to deliver,” Lopez concluded.
