Why Overlays are Best for Avoiding Technical Debt

Is the pain of technical debt giving you analysis paralysis? Using an overlay solution will help you avoid technical debt while working in parallel to prolong the life of your current services while making it easier to bring in new ones.

Digital Transformation

It seems like for the last decade we've been talking about Digital Transformation. Depending on your industry, you've heard it called a few things now:

• Future of Connectivity
• Multicloud/Super Cloud
• SASE/SSE
• Future of [Insert Industry Here]
• Industry 4.0
• Utility 2.0

All of these bullet points fall under the umbrella of digital transformation. While there are a lot of buzzwords here, digital transformation is something that companies are currently pursuing. It's not all vaporware and mirrors.

According to a report from Flexera, 89% of companies are planning to move to a mutlicloud architecture. Some will go all public, some all private, but most will be doing a mixture of both. Not to mention sprinkling in hybrid work and new ways of working which emerged over the last couple of years:'

• Curbside checkout for Retail stores
• Location specific coupon promotion for Retail
• Asset tracking and indoor location services in multilple industries, but especially Retail and Manufacturing
• Energy Usage Services to homeowners and commercial entities for Energy and Utility companies

All of these new streams of revenue, these business drivers, are a part of the digital transformation that IT teams are expected to provide.

Technical Debt

For those not already familiar with the term technical debt, it's what happens when IT is forced to keep using a solution that no longer fits their needs simply and easily.

IT teams generally pick new solutions based on the following:

• Alignment with the current services they're offering to their customers
• Alignment with their internal applications and processes
• Alignment with their budget

This all makes a lot of sense, until things fall out of alignment, of course. But as oceans become more red, new competitors offer different capabilities at a different cost which may align better with your goals.

Now vendors offering those solutions, especially vendors who have quite a bit of market share, make it  their business model to lock you in. For example, if you're using Infoblox, then you are locked into the Infoblox system no matter where or how you'd like to manage your DNS, DHCP, and IP information. Their business model is a closed model in order to lock you in. This makes a lot of sense for them because they already have your business.

The Rip-and-Replace Cycle

With a closed model like this, it's nearly impossible not to fall into the technical debt trap. You're all in on this solution that you chose 2, 5, or 10 years ago when you didn't have present-day information.

IT teams therefore don't get any real training on other solutions because there's just no time. They're accumulating more and more technical debt trying to make old solutions work with new architectures. Traditionally the only way out  of this was to rip-and-replace entire solutions and platforms leading to risky and painful migration projects. Then just holding our breath to see how long the new solution would last.

Using an Overlay Solution for DNS, DHCP, and IPAM

While unfortunately we can't fix this for your entire network, we can help you avoid this cycle of technical debt for your DNS, DHCP, and IP environments.  

Micetro is a non-authoritative and non-disruptive overlay solution for your entire DDI (DNS, DHCP, and IPAM) environment whether you’re running workloads on-premises and/or in the cloud. It offers one UI or one API so that you only have one place to go to create and maintain workflows and processes, even if you decide to change cloud providers or other services later. In fact, we’ll even manage your other DDI solutions, the ones that try to keep you locked in, while you migrate away from them.

Micetro uses a pure role-based access control model which can be built from scratch or integrated with your Active Directory users and groups and your public cloud users so that you can easily manage access control even down to the DNS zone or DHCP scope, for example.

Micetro makes it easy to look up audit trails and history for every object, no matter where it resides to know what was changed, who made the change, when the change was made, and even why.

We can create custom searchable properties that can be used to track and organize all of our projects. And of course we can use the full and robust APIs to integrate with the third-party systems like ServiceNow or PRTG that you’re already using, or create your own workflows using Ansible, Terraform, Powershell, or even custom scripting.

Try it out in less than 30 minutes

Want to see for yourself why Micetro users stick with Micetro even without being locked in? Check out our Free Trial and then watch our YouTube Deployment Playlist to get started in minutes. If you don't like it, just uninstall it and your DNS, DHCP, and IP information will continue running as before! Install on Windows, Linux, or through the Azure Marketplace.