Try asking this question at your next leadership meeting:
“Who runs our DNS?”
Then watch.
There will be a pause. Somebody will offer to check. Somebody else will name a vendor, usually whoever registered the domain a decade ago, and nobody in the room will be able to say when that vendor was last looked at.
We’ve been running a domain registrar and managed DNS provider since 1998, and that pause is one of the most reliable diagnostics we know. The longer it lasts, the more exposed the company is.
Nobody Cares About DNS Until It Stops Working
We’ve been saying that at easyDNS since our earliest days, and nothing in the intervening decades has made it less true.
A company will spend millions on firewalls, endpoint detection, a SOC, disaster recovery plans, and cyberthreat insurance. And the entire stack hangs off a layer nobody in the building owns, budgeted at roughly the price of a lunch. The answers we hear when executives finally ask the question tend to sort themselves neatly.
The Defense Layer Outside Your Walls
Here’s what your security stack doesn’t cover.
Every domain your company operates sits in a registry. Access to that registry runs through a registrar. The registrar publishes your nameserver delegation, which tells the entire internet where to find your DNS. And your authoritative DNS answers every lookup for every service you run.
All of it happens outside your usual perimeter. For example, your firewall never inspects it. Your SIEM never logs it. Your internal network team, however competent, does not control the registrar account or the delegation. They control resolution inside the walls. The control plane for the whole company sits at a vendor.
Let’s Take a Moment To See Real World Failure
When resolution fails, whether from an outage, a DDoS attack, a hijacked registrar account, or a domain that quietly expired, everything disappears at once.
- The website.
- Corporate email.
- Customer-facing APIs.
- The VPN.
- Single sign-on into every SaaS tool your teams touch.
It doesn’t matter how resilient each of those systems is on its own. If the name doesn’t resolve, none of it exists. In 2012, a GoDaddy outage knocked millions of domains offline. Hackers claimed credit, which made for better headlines, but the cause was a router misconfiguration.
The Commodity Trap
Why does this keep happening? Because domains and DNS is too often priced as a commodity. It gets bundled up. The domain came bundled with the web host or the ISP. It costs fifteen dollars a year. Nobody assigns ownership to something that costs fifteen dollars a year.
But price and criticality have nothing to do with each other. DNS is the cheapest line item in your IT budget and the single largest dependency in your company.
Secure Domains Like This
Treating DNS as mission-critical infrastructure isn’t complicated.
It looks like this:
- Anycast DNS, so resolution is fast everywhere on the planet and a DDoS attack hits a globally distributed network instead of a box in a closet.
- DNSSEC, enabled and automated, so spoofed responses and cache poisoning get rejected cryptographically instead of trusted blindly.
- A 100% uptime guarantee backed by infrastructure with decades of operational history, not a best-effort bundle from a hosting reseller.
- Redundancy and monitoring that go deeper than the hostname level: host monitoring, GEO DNS, dynamic DNS, and failover at the nameserver delegation layer itself, which is the one layer most providers never touch.
That’s what we built DomainSure’s Commercial DNS Solutions on:
The same easyDNS anycast and unicast infrastructure we’ve been hardening since the nineties, run by people who treat your domains as what they are. The foundation everything else stands on.
But, Ask the Question Anyway
Maybe your CTO answers immediately. A named provider, a named owner, DNSSEC signed, delegation monitored. That’s good. Then you’re in the minority.
If the answer comes with a pause, the pause is your to-do list.
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