Articles

Reason to use Men&Mice for IPAM and DNS with Windows 2016 and Azure

Robust and trusted: magic words in any enterprise IT environment.

Sep 20th, 2018

Men&Mice + Microsoft Ignite

It's no surprise, given our long-standing relationship and integration with Microsoft's solutions, as well as our mutual enterprise customers, that we'll be attending the Microsoft Ignite event again this year.

Come to Booth 108, where we'll be answering questions and demoing the Men&Mice Suite. But if you want to learn more about Men&Mice and Microsoft, here's some information that can help you understand our compatibility and how that may be beneficial to your network infrastructure management and operations.

Men&Mice and Microsoft

Robust and trusted: magic words in any enterprise IT environment.

Microsoft has been able to largely dominate this space because its products are robust and its reputation is trusted. Enterprise IT professionals understand the value accountability that their network infrastructure solutions brings to the table.

With the Men&Mice Suite for DNS, DHCP and IPAM (DDI), you can leverage your existing Microsoft investments without replacing hardware or adding additional appliances. Trusted for decades by the architects and managers overseeing some of the world’s largest network infrastructures, Men&Mice offers simplified integration, advanced control, and improved security.

Why Men&Mice?

What makes the Men&Mice DDI Suite valuable? Using Men&Mice’s software solutions with your existing Microsoft environment has numerous important advantages through our architecture, Active Directory and Azure integration.

The more robust a network is, the more complex it becomes. Men&Mice, simply put, ‘takes the daunt’ out of network management, while still staying robust and providing the ever-expanding features and support our customers came to trust.

As you scale to meet your expanding networking needs, Men&Mice offers you flexibility, portability, and complete management - all while cutting operational expenses and strengthening overall network resilience.

Architecture

Any vendor-specific appliance, including Microsoft, works best in their own homogenous environment. But the everyday realities of life rarely afford businesses the luxury of such. Once a foreign element, from another vendor or from the same but in another location, is given entry to the network, the chances for strategic disconnect and vulnerabilities multiply.

The Men&Mice suite (now at version 9.1) is an overlay DDI solution. Its architecture is designed to intuitively integrate with a Microsoft infrastructure environment or multi-vendor, multi-platform networks.

The Men&Mice Suite takes care of coordinating between hardware, software, no matter where they are or where they’re from. It unifies resources under a single-pane-of-glass interface, and can be deployed non-destructively. A powerful API serves the users for automation, while redundancies and fine-tuned access control ensures security.

Core advantages of the Men&Mice Suite architecture include:

  • Single pane of glass visibility over all DDI operations on-prem and in the cloud.
  • Audit trails across all changes to DNS, DHCP, and IPAM.
  • Granular, role-based access to objects residing with MS servers, services, and cloud subscriptions.
  • Easy and automated migration of data from server to server, or between on-prem and cloud.
  • Reliable and widely compatible APIs to automate and manage all your DDI operations and data.
  • Monitoring of data integrity and usage, such as DHCP scope and subnet utilization.

Active Directory

The Active Directory synergy of the Men&Mice suite is at the core of our product, and has been since the earliest days. As the first IPAM solution to fully integrate with Microsoft Active Directory, we can list - among others - functionality essential to enterprise businesses powered by Microsoft software:

  • Synchronization ensures real-time system integrity, allowing and propagating changes through both the Men&Mice Suite or Active Directory.
  • Role-based granular access (both for users and groups), tracking, and auditing fortifies security and boosts administrative efficiency. Users can be authenticated through Active Directory (AD) and use single sign-on (SSO) to access Men&Mice Suite.
  • Global overview and administration of Sites and Subnets directly through the Men&Mice Suite.

Portability

With the 9.1 release of the Men&Mice Suite, we've introduced a web-based application. It is designed to (further) simplify the day-to-day management of your company's network,

Having everything at your disposal all the time can often result in complicated, slow processes for even the simplest tasks. We’ve cut down on the noise, deploying our wealth of experience working with and listening to enterprise IT professionals, to identify the most common tasks.

And then we made them lightning-fast and possible to do on any device, from anywhere in the world. (While still plugging into Active Directory, if required. Portability is no excuse for less security.)

Azure

Our customers are the customers of Microsoft as well: we support their needs and investments in IT.

Microsoft takes their cloud strategy seriously, and so do we. We've been working closely with various solutions teams at Microsoft to build compatibility into the Men&Mice Suite. For example, we were the first to offer comprehensive support for Windows Server 2016 (including zone scope and DNS policies) and Azure DNS.

Whether your company is migrating to Azure from another provider, or looking to scale its existing network, Men&Mice provides support through:

  • Cloud-native integration with Azure and Azure DNS.
  • Bulk migration or import of DNS zones into Azure DNS.
  • Tracking changes, delegating access, and seeing all zones across multiple subscriptions, and managing data through APIs after migration.

It's only natural that the same compatibility, ease-of-use, security, and portability that our customers got used to with regards to Microsoft’s existing software and Active Directory, exists for Azure DNS as well.