Report Shows Continued Need for Redundant DNS

DNS is a mission-critical service for every enterprise. When DNS fails, or is taken down in an attack, the websites, applications and online services that depend on it effectively disappear from the internet taking revenue and brand reputation down with it. Which is why implementing a secondary or redundant DNS is critical to the success of modern businesses and today’s connected economy.

There have been several high-profile DNS outages over the past decade. Despite the wide-spread impact of these outages, companies aren’t doing all they can to mitigate the impact of a DNS outage and ensure business resiliency. Those are some of the findings from a team of academics from Carnegie Mellon University. The report found that of the 100,000 websites analyzed, 84.8% of all analyzed websites relied on one single DNS provider.

When DNS fails, or is taken down in an attack, the websites, applications and online services that depend on it effectively disappear from the internet, taking revenue and brand reputation down with it. Without a secondary or redundant DNS provider, your environment is at risk. You can mitigate this risk by building redundancies and failover mechanisms into your infrastructure to avoid outages.

There are three common topologies for implementing redundant DNS with two providers:

• Primary / secondary
• Hidden primary, two secondary DNS providers
• Primary / primary

Creating business resiliency does not have to be complex. NS1 supports a secondary DNS setup, with NS1 running alongside another, separate DNS provider.

NS1 is experienced in working with customers to ensure there are no record synchronization issues, and can help you establish dual provider redundancy. We support toolkits like OctoDNS and Terraform that can make it easier to manage multiple DNS providers.