Meet Our Moderators: Nic Williams

ThomasWilimitis

Welcome to the Meet Our Moderators series—where you get to know the amazing folks behind the scenes keeping the Infoblox Community running smoothly and making sure your posts get the attention they deserve.

This week, say hello to Nic Williams

What’s your role at Infoblox and your area of expertise?

I work in the field with customers advising them of all technical information regarding Infoblox products. I wouldn’t say I have a specific area of expertise—just a lot of experience gained from troubleshooting and solving complex challenges over the years.

What's a trending topic in tech that you’re excited about (or skeptical of)? 

Something I noodle on from time to time is this idea of an IOC extinction. When we look at some sophisticated groups that use a type of operational relay box (ORB) to obfuscate their operations—say Scattered Spider popping people's home edge routers and using them to redirect malicious traffic from their infrastructure to yours—how do defenders effectively work against that? With firewalls and IP blocking, you'd be blocking a fair amount of US-based web traffic to your environment. Maybe the solution is hosting your services elsewhere ... but generating a signature to protect against something ephemeral is challenging. Not any one solution excels at this.

It appears there is a growing number of IOCs that are becoming less deterministic and is an accelerating trend. I don't believe AI will solve this, but I'm willing to be wrong. Eager to discover more! 

What type of questions or discussions do you hope to see more of in the Community? 

I spend most of my time discussing “art of the possible” with my customers. Some automate 95%+ of DDI-related tasks and dedicate less than a quarter of an FTE to manage the products (i.e. they created a self-service portal for end users). Some use outbound automation to kick off SOAR playbooks, incidents or to do threat hunting. I'd like to see more "how do I use this piece of Infoblox best" as opposed to "how do I import data from Microsoft" type discussions. Both have their merit, but more technical thought leadership from our customers would be welcome. There are a lot of good outcomes that are powered by DDI data, many of which are unknown, underutilized or unused. 

What’s a fun fact most people don’t know about you? 

Outside of technology, I've spent 13 years playing rugby and serve as President for my local club. I'm proud of my club—we're the only one in the region with teams for youth boys, girls, men's, women's and senior men...that's a lot of people and community engagement!  

Prior to working in technology, I spent my life living in a tent 4 months out of the year as a wilderness guide in Alaska. I like to joke that I got all my fun out before settling down to a desk job. 

What would be your dream job if you weren’t in tech?

I grew up watching Warren Miller ski films. Those folks seem to really have it made. In one of them, they did a Pan-American road trip from Chile all the way to Alaska, following the ski seasons. I'd probably repeat that and then try it everywhere else on Earth. I remind myself they are professional athletes, but certainly the environment they work in seems favorable at least 😊

Anything else you’d like Community members to know about you or how to connect? 

I wrote a blog for Infoblox recently regarding the role of DDI data in Zero Trust. As mentioned, I enjoy talking about what we “do” with our data. If there are further questions, feel free to reach out to me!