Protect Your Domain and DNS

The domain name system or DNS is kind of like a phone book. When you try to go to something on either a public network or a private network odds are DNS will get you there.

The most common instance of this is when you go to a website, that is actually translated in the background to what’s called an IP address and routed to that website so you can see it, all in the background.

The bottom line is your organization has a domain name, right? And that domain name has DNS settings to tell the rest of the world where web traffic should go to, where email should go to, all of that kind of fun stuff that you really don’t have to spend a lot of time maintaining.

But you need to make sure that you have access to it and that it’s yours.

What I mean by that is we’ve seen many organizations that have given full access or even control to third parties, usually web designers and then the web designers either screw it up or go out of business or just disappear and the client is left holding the bag and nobody can get to their website and nobody can send them email.

And guess what? It’s hard to fix depending upon circumstances and situations. So what do you have to do to protect yourself?

Well first, your domain and DNS settings should all be within your organization, whether it be through GO Daddy, Network Solutions, whatever reputable third party. You can then give limited or full access to your web designers, your managed service providers and the like, but you want to make sure that you own the domain, not somebody else, because that’s really a pain in the butt to fix. You want to have control and access over the DNS settings

That way if somebody screws it up or disappears and screws it up you still have access to be able to fix it.

If you have questions about protecting your DNS settings, contact us!