AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
How to Enhance Asset Visibility with Infoblox and AWS
By: Rajkumar Repswal, Staff Technical Marketing Engineer – Infoblox
By: Rajendra Kulkarni, Sr. Partner Solution Architect – AWS
By: Scott Sundby, Sr. Technical Account Manager – AWS
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Cloud sprawl and unintentional resource expansion have become critical challenges as organizations speed up their digital transformation initiatives. According to a cloud waste survey by StormForge, organizations spend over $17B annually on unused cloud resources, highlighting the urgent need for better asset management. While AWS provides robust native tools for resource management, organizations still struggle with centralized visibility across multiple accounts and regions.
Cloud cost management in AWS benefits from pay-as-you-go pricing, but organizations must vigilantly monitor and eliminate unused resources. Zombie or orphaned assets – including detached storage volumes, idle load balancers, and unused public IP addresses – continue to accrue unnecessary expenses while expanding the attack surface. Dangling DNS records, particularly outdated CNAME records, create security vulnerabilities that malicious actors can exploit through sub-domain takeovers.
AWS provides powerful tools like AWS Cost Explorer, AWS Security Hub, AWS Config, Amazon CloudWatch and AWS Trusted Advisor to identify idle and non-compliant assets, enabling cost optimization, improved security and consolidated view across the regions. Complementing these capabilities, Infoblox Universal Asset Insights discovers and organizes AWS assets, offering enhanced visibility to help organizations better manage their cloud environments, further reducing costs and mitigating security risks.
This blog explores how Infoblox Universal Asset Insights complements AWS’s native capabilities to provide enhanced visibility and control over cloud assets, helping organizations optimize costs and strengthen security postures.
Revolutionizing Cloud Asset Management with Universal Asset Insights
Universal Asset Insights provides a comprehensive solution for visibility and asset management across the entire network, including all AWS accounts, regions, and the entire organization, including on-premises assets. Through its centralized console, AWS customers gain a single view of their infrastructure, along with insights and analysis to detect zombie and non-compliant assets across AWS environments. To showcase the power of Infoblox Universal Asset Insights, we’ll explore how it collects asset data from AWS and other sources, transforming this information into greater insights by classifying assets discovered through critical network services such as DNS.
Discovering and Classifying Zombie Assets
Universal Asset Insights uses cloud-native API endpoints to query AWS and pull detailed information about all resources across AWS accounts, regions, and organizational units. This includes key network objects in AWS such as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), Amazon Elastic Block Store (Amazon EBS), Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC). Also subnets, elastic IP addresses, route tables, network interfaces, and NAT gateways.
Universal Asset Insights continuously monitors your AWS environment according to customizable schedules, providing comprehensive visibility across multiple AWS accounts and on-premises assets while storing normalized data in a common asset database. Through sophisticated data de-duplication processes, the tool standardizes information across AWS accounts and presents it in a centralized console.
As shown in Figure 1, the asset inventory dashboard offers a unified, filterable view where administrators can efficiently manage all assets across AWS regions and accounts from a single location, eliminating the need for multiple account switching and streamlining resource management.
Figure 1. Asset Inventory
Empowering CloudOps with Advanced Visualization
After AWS asset data is consolidated and normalized, assets are evaluated based on usage patterns, activity trends, and compliance indicators. Underutilized, forgotten, or misconfigured assets are categorized as zombie assets, non-compliant assets, or unregistered.
For CloudOps administrators, the Infoblox Portal serves as a powerful command center for efficient asset management. The Assets Dashboard provides an immediate overview of the entire cloud environment, highlighting key metrics and potential issues at a glance. Administrators can easily filter and drill down into specific zombie assets, accessing detailed information about each resource. This granular visibility enables quick decision-making and efficient resource cleanup, helping organizations maintain optimal cloud spending while reducing their security attack surface. The intuitive interface consolidates data from multiple AWS accounts and regions, eliminating the need to switch between different consoles. This centralized approach not only saves time but also ensures consistent asset management across the entire organization.
The Infoblox Portal’s Assets Workspace summarizes insights for all resources across AWS, other public clouds, private clouds, and on-premises networks, this is shown in Figure 2 below. This includes monitors for Zombie Assets by Confidence Level, Unregistered Assets with Missing Records, and Non-complaint Assets.
Figure 2. Assets Dashboard
To explore AWS zombie assets as shown in Figure 3, the admin can filter the asset inventory to show all zombie assets in the AWS environment. The inventory lists zombie assets like unattached EBS volumes, orphaned load balancers, and unattached Elastic IPs.
Figure 3. Zombie Assets
Universal Asset Insights provides detailed information when an admin selects a zombie asset as shown in Figure 4. This allows the admin to quickly locate and terminate the asset, reducing unnecessary costs and attack surface.
Figure 4. Rich details about Zombie Asset from Overview and Advanced section
The Power of Intelligent Asset Management: Real Results in Action
Organizations today face mounting pressure to optimize their cloud investments while maintaining robust security. Infoblox Universal Asset Insights tackles these challenges head-on by delivering a powerful trifecta of benefits: cost optimization, enhanced security, and streamlined operations. Through automated discovery and AI-driven analysis, organizations can now make data-driven decisions that eliminate wasteful spending while actively identifying security risks before they become threats.
A Transformation Story: From Chaos to Clarity
Consider the remarkable transformation of a global marketing communications powerhouse struggling with cloud sprawl across 300 offices. Their complex multi-cloud environment had become unmanageable, with hidden costs and security vulnerabilities lurking in every corner. Universal Asset Insights changed their story in just 30 minutes – discovering an astounding 130,000 assets across their cloud infrastructure and unveiling the true scope of their digital footprint.
The results proved transformative. The platform uncovered 2,800 zombie assets silently draining resources, while also identifying numerous non-compliant assets exposed to potential threats. By taking action on these insights, the company achieved a remarkable reduction in cloud costs and dramatically improved their security posture by reducing their attack surface.
The Path Forward: Beyond Asset Management
This success story exemplifies how intelligent asset management transcends simple resource tracking. It demonstrates the power of combining comprehensive visibility with actionable insights to drive real business outcomes. Organizations can now proactively manage their cloud environments, making informed decisions that balance cost optimization with security requirements. This approach represents the future of cloud management – where visibility, control, and automation converge to create resilient and efficient digital operations.
Conclusion
In today’s rapidly evolving cloud landscape, organizations face a critical choice: continue struggling with fragmented visibility and rising costs or embrace intelligent asset management to build an efficient, secure future. Through Universal Asset Insights, we’ve seen how comprehensive visibility and actionable intelligence can transform chaotic cloud environments into well-organized, cost-effective operations.
The path to cloud excellence is clear, and it begins with a single step. By implementing Universal Asset Insights, your organization can join industry leaders who have already discovered the power of unified asset management across AWS and on-premises environments. They’ve eliminated zombie assets, strengthened security, and optimized costs – all through the lens of intelligent automation and comprehensive visibility.
To learn more about Universal Asset Insights and how it can help you manage your cloud and on-premises infrastructure more effectively, visit Infoblox.com. Ready to see Infoblox Universal Asset Insight in action? Talk to an expert today to see a free demo and discover how you can optimize your AWS environment, reduce costs, and enhance security across your entire network infrastructure.
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Infoblox – AWS Partner Spotlight
Infoblox is an AWS Advanced Technology Partner and the industry leader in DNS, DHCP and IP address management (DDI), unifies the delivery and management of critical network services with Infoblox Universal DDI Product Suite, the most comprehensive, advanced, and integrated portfolio for deploying and managing DNS, DHCP, IP address management, and visibility solutions across hybrid, multi-cloud environments.