Your digital infrastructure is critical to business operations. According to research, the cost of a service outage has increased over the last few years. Data published in 2023 found that:
- 45% of outages cost between $100,000 and $1 million
- 29% of outages cost under $100,000
- 25% of outages cost over $1 million
Your digital infrastructure’s availability and resiliency are more important than ever before. As the foundation of your digital operations, your Domain Name Service (DNS) infrastructure is the core of nearly every other area of your business. However, managing your DNS infrastructure can be time-consuming, especially if you own the infrastructure.
Choosing the right DNS service provider can help you maintain operations and improve security. By knowing what managed DNS service is and what questions to ask when doing your due diligence, you can reduce risk and improve customer satisfaction.
What is managed DNS?
A managed DNS service provider takes on an organization’s responsibility for an organization’s:
- DNS routing
- Resolving hostnames
- IP address resolution
These functionalities include monitoring and daily maintenance to ensure:
- Reliability: providing a backup for when a normal service fails
- Security: managing DNS server security and monitoring for attacks
- Scalability: handling traffic spikes without disrupting service
- Performance: ensuring connectivity speed for business operations
What are the benefits of managed DNS services?
An organization’s DNS translates the human language of the internet – www.example.com – to a numeric Internet Protocol (IP) address. Going deeper into the benefits of a managed DNS provider can help you determine whether you’re ready to work with one.
Reliability to reduce business interruption.
Since the DNS server translates the website’s name into an IP address, a failure means that your services go offline. A managed DNS service provides automatic failover, meaning it has multiple DNS servers.
The provider monitors its DNS servers continuously. If one server fails to respond appropriately, the service provider automatically changes the DNS response record and forwards queries to an online server. This failover server steps in so that users never experience an outage, mitigating business interruption risks.
Speed to maintain customer satisfaction.
When people use the internet, their requests usually travel to the nearest DNS server because the shorter the geographic distance, the faster the response. A managed DNS provider typically has multiple nodes and servers in different cities and countries around the world.
With more DNS servers, the provider has a better geographic balance. For example, if someone is making requests from Connecticut, they have two large cities nearby, New York and Boston. New York might be the closest, and most requests would be routed there. However, if your company wants to prevent the New York location from being overloaded, the Boston server would still preserve most of the speed. If you’re only using DNS servers in New York and Los Angeles, the ability to preserve performance is lower.
Security to mitigate risks and reduce costs.
Managing DNS security can be a time-consuming, complex activity. Implementing Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC) is part of a robust defense-in-depth security program. DNSSEC encrypts DNS records, which allows you to validate the authenticity of the record and match it to the authoritative name server.
In some cases, a managed DNS provider may also offer Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) security mitigation functionalities, like:
- DNS redirection: deploying multiple global servers that can resolve the address to provide backup against attacks against a single node
- Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) connection service configurations: automatically rerouting traffic flows efficiently to reduce service impact
Scalability to maintain service during traffic spikes.
Since DNS servers resolve requests between users and websites, they should respond to high-traffic periods. For example, an eCommerce company may receive abnormally high volumes of requests on Black Friday, or an energy company may receive a deluge of requests after a hurricane causes power outages.
The DNS infrastructure needs to maintain service during these periods. Since the managed DNS service provides multiple servers, it can manage the increased traffic without compromising your business operations.
3 considerations when choosing a managed DNS service.
Whether you host your own DNS infrastructure or want to change providers, choosing a managed DNS service requires research. As part of doing DNS service provider research, you should get answers to the following five questions.
1. What is your global server distribution?
Fundamentally, the number and location of the DNS servers should be the starting point for any decision you make. A DNS provider’s ability to improve reliability, performance, and scalability often relies on the number of servers they have and where they reside. This enables the provider to redistribute queries so that the servers respond faster.
Some questions to ask might include:
- How many nodes do you manage?
- What geographic regions are your nodes located in?
- Do you use Anycast routing so that queries are answered by the closest servers?
- How do you handle redundancy to ensure continued availability?
- What are your service level agreements (SLAs)?
2. How do you manage load balancing?
A managed DNS provider should distribute incoming requests and traffic across multiple DNS servers to route requests to different IP addresses when responding to DNS queries. Depending on your needs, you may want a simple solution or a more advanced one. Many providers offer DNS server pools to distribute traffic across multiple servers based on either pre-set or customized ratios.
Some questions to ask might include:
- How often does the monitor probe send requests to the target addresses, and can I customize this if I need to?
- How do you select the records that the return response serves?
- Can I group servers by CNAME record, or am I limited to A and AAAA Records?
- Can I customize the functions and details about the server pool beyond displaying just the associated records?
3. What types of services do you provide?
One of the most important words in managed DNS service is service. Managing DNS and the associated security on your own quickly becomes overwhelming. While many managed DNS services ensure the infrastructure remains available, you may still need to manage daily maintenance tasks, like zone management. When considering a managed DNS service, you should ensure that it provides the level of customer support you need.
Some questions to ask might include:
- Do you provide DNSSEC to secure zones?
- What features do you provide that enable me to maintain good DNS hygiene?
- Do you have resources to help me provision and optimize my DNS strategy?
- Do you have a Network Operations Center (NOC) to help me monitor traffic for irregularities?
- Do you offer a Security Operations Center (SOC) to help me identify and mitigate DDoS attacks?
Managed DNS services with Vercara.
Managing your DNS infrastructure is essential for ensuring your digital operations run smoothly and securely. Vercara’s managed DNS services offer a comprehensive solution that addresses the critical needs of your business. Our services ensure high availability, robust security, and seamless scalability. With features like automatic failover, global server distribution, DNSSEC implementation, and advanced load balancing, Vercara helps you maintain optimal performance and security. Additionally, our dedicated Network Operations Center (NOC) and Security Operations Center (SOC) provide continuous monitoring and support to swiftly handle any irregularities or attacks, allowing your business to thrive without interruption.
