SOLIDserver Release 8.0: Enhancing Multi Cloud Control and Security

The Release 8.0 of SOLIDserver puts strong focus on support of multi cloud services and strengthening of DNS Security, thus helping network teams improve control and visibility over their entire infrastructure.

In particular, it enhances the existing DNS Cloud feature with Azure DNS Zones capability, and builds on EfficientIP’s award-winning DNS Guardian solution for improving filtering of DNS queries and expanding capacity of security policies.

The main features introduced with Release 8.0 include the following:

1) DNS Cloud for Azure Zones: Helping Avoid Vendor Lock-in

Release 8.0 adds the management of the public zones in Azure DNS, enhancing the existing DNS Cloud feature which already allows the management of AWS Route 53 DNS service. The DNS service can therefore be managed directly from the SOLIDserver for SOLIDserver DNS appliances, SOLIDserver packages and containers, Microsoft DNS service and cloud services from Azure and AWS. This enhancement supports the strong multi cloud trend within those organizations looking for robustness, service continuity and avoidance of vendor lock-in.

When associated with EfficientIP’s SmartArchitecture for DNS, DNS Cloud for Azure allows hybrid management of multiple solutions, even different cloud solutions. It suppresses the complexity of building architectures for public authoritative DNS service and uses specific administration panels for this management. Everything is controlled and performed using the SOLIDserver, helping eliminate configuration errors and ease deployment of new zones and records on various DNS solutions.

2) IPAM Sync for Azure Enhancements: Bringing More Flexible Resource Synchronization

The IPAM synchronization for Azure IPAM data is now able to handle multiple virtual networks and resource groups with powerful filtering based on regular expression. Whether you want to have full visibility of the Azure resources and would like to synchronize every piece of data, or you want to include only specific ones, the IPAM sync offers a vast range of configurations.

3) SOLIDserver Prometheus Observability: Easing Capacity Planning

Observability and analysis of the SOLIDserver appliances metrics can be performed by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Prometheus solution through a native connector, helping support and capacity planning activities. This provides capability to obtain statistics from the SOLIDserver appliance using the Prometheus collect and storage engine. Interesting metrics include uptime, cpu consumed, disk capacity availability, system load, memory usage and network usage per interface.

The system is also open to expose specific service metrics that are made available on the SOLIDserver, in a format ideal for integration or professional services development.

4) DNS Guardian Trigger Passthrough for List: Enhancing Agility of Query Filtering

The DNS security engine (DNS Guardian) is able to analyze client queries in order to apply specific countermeasures when the behavior is not following the security policy. For some devices or for some FQDN it may be important to disable the analysis and the application of the countermeasure.

A Client Query Filtering (CQF) configuration can be applied to suppress triggering on specific client or destination domains.

An example usage might be for a forensic team to use a dedicated solution like a sandbox to check malware behavior without being blocked by the DNS Guardian. It can also be interesting to suppress Guardian analysis on well known and trusted domains to avoid any false positives.

5) DNS Guardian Increased Views and Client List Format: Expanding Capacity of Security Policies

The number of views that are supported on the DNS Guardian has been raised, and configuration of client query filtering simplified. These features help provide even more flexibility and capacity for implementing security policies.

6) DNS / DHCP in Container: Making Edge Services Even Easier to Deploy

The packaging offer is extended to the support of Linux containers for both DNS and DHCP services.