What is managed DNS?

A managed DNS provider stores the authoritative DNS records for a client organization’s domains and hostnames on their DNS servers, and handles server configuration, maintenance and security protocols for the client organization. In most cases, providers use a globally distributed network of servers. At the same time, the client manages their own DNS records on the provider’s servers, usually through a provider platform or application programming interfaces (APIs).

Managed DNS services often provide features such as anycast routing, load balancing, uptime service level agreements (SLAs), failover protection, DNS security extensions (DNSSEC), and monitoring and troubleshooting tools. These tools help enable faster, more reliable, more secure domain resolution than traditional self-managed DNS setups.

Essentially, with managed DNS, the DNS lookup process remains the same, but the client is not responsible for provisioning and managing their own DNS servers.

Choosing between self-managed and managed DNS services depends on several organizational factors, including size of the organization, complexity of DNS needs, budgetary constraints, organizational expertise and IT resources, and the required level of DNS data control. Naturally, the self-management approach has its own benefits.

Self-managed DNS gives IT teams complete control of DNS configuration, so they can fully customize DNS settings to their exact specifications, apps and services. Self-managed DNS might also provide cost savings because managed DNS involves paying ongoing DNS management and maintenance fees to a service provider.

Because self-management means keeping more data on-premises, or in an organization’s cloud, it can reduce the risk of security and data breaches. However, these security gains are contingent upon the organization having the expertise to implement strong security measures.

Self-management of DNS servers presents its own costs, challenges and risks. For one, managed DNS solutions might save IT teams from the extra effort (and associated costs) needed to automate server management and DNS zone orchestration processes.

In addition, DNS traffic patterns can vary widely and are often unpredictable, making it challenging to anticipate spikes in volume and manage load balancing protocols. A managed DNS service with a global network of DNS servers and automatic failover protections might offer greater reliability and scalability during peak traffic times or during unexpected changes.

If an organization chooses self-management, it must also manage its own response to security threats such as DDoS attacks (distributed denial-of-service attacks), which might overwhelm targeted servers with a barrage of internet traffic. Managed DNS services often provide security features such as DDoS mitigation and DNSSEC support to protect against DNS spoofing, DNS amplification attacks and other threats.

To fulfill user experience expectations for a global audience, networks aim to deliver responses within milliseconds, regardless of where the query originates. Because internet queries can travel only so fast, delivering a high-performance site globally requires a DNS solution with servers (called “points of presence” or PoPs) around the world. These solutions enable fast resolution of DNS queries at scale.

For many organizations, the cost of building a global network of DNS servers with enough capacity, security and resilience to meet the demands of today’s internet—combined with the cost of training personnel—is prohibitively expensive.

Organizations must weigh the challenges and benefits carefully and with consideration for their long-term strategy, the performance demands of their users, and any potential security risks. Some organizations might benefit from a hybrid approach that enables an organization to maintain a private, self-managed network for internal network queries, and use a managed DNS provider for their public-facing websites and resources. 

A managed DNS service usually offers a variety of features, including:

• Anycast DNS
• Automated DNS failover and disaster recovery
• DNS steering
• Dynamic DNS (DDNS)
• Enhanced server security
• Global load balancing
• Advanced server analytics

Anycast is a routing technique where multiple servers hosted in different geographic locations share one IP address. Queries are routed to the nearest or strongest performing server in the group, increasing DNS resolution speeds and minimizing the impact of latency issues and server outages.

Managed DNS features can distribute traffic across secondary DNS servers (by using zone transfers) whenever the primary server fails or encounters unplanned downtime or latency issues. 

Many organizations use multiple content delivery networks (CDNs) to enable faster web performance by locating copies of web content closer to users and facilitating the delivery of dynamic content.

DNS steering is normally used with CDNs to more intelligently manage and route the traffic to websites. DNS steering acts as a traffic director, finding the optimal path for the traffic, based on server location, latency and health checks, business rules, and real user monitoring (RUM)—the information about how people interact with online applications and services. In addition, DNS steering can help route traffic around outages and service deprecations.

To save the time and effort of manually updating records, many services offer dynamic DNS (DDNS), which automatically updates name server records when IP addresses change. In particular, DDNS helps ensure that sites, networks and devices with dynamic IP addresses—such as mobile devices, home networks or public wifi networks—can be located when their IP addresses change.

Managed DNS services usually provide real-time threat detection and response capabilities that protect servers against malware, phishing and other malicious traffic such as DDoS attacks. For many organizations, DDoS protection remains a concern. The latest Cost of a Data Breach Report states that DDoS attacks take an average of 236 days to identify and contain across various environments.

Many managed DNS servers also offer DNSSEC support.

Managed DNS can distribute web traffic and make query routing decisions across a globally distributed network of servers based on server performance, use case and location.

With a managed DNS system, teams can receive real-time updates and insights on query types and volumes, latency, source IP addresses, geographical distribution of requests and more. This information helps IT teams better understand their network demands and performance.

Managed DNS providers—such as Microsoft Azure DNS, Google Cloud DNS, Oracle Dyn, Cloudflare and IBM NS1—offer secured, high-availability, high-redundancy systems that deliver fast DNS lookup and optimized DNS functions. Benefits of managed DNS solutions include:

• Maximum uptime and resilience
• Fast response times
• Accelerated propagation times
• Increased efficiencies
• Outsourcing technical headaches
• Regulatory compliance
• Pay-as-you-go pricing

DNS providers are now using artificial intelligence (AI) to improve managed DNS, and that trend will most likely continue as these tools evolve and improve.¹

For example, some AI-powered analytics tools can identify performance issues and automatically take corrective action more quickly than human operators. This enhanced detection capability can help identify and defend against DDoS attacks or attempts at cache poisoning—when a malicious attacker injects invalid data into a system’s cache to be served to users as legitmate. 

Managed DNS providers are increasingly combining and incorporating machine learning (ML) models and automation in their services to flag suspicious domains, analyze attack patterns and adjust their defense posture to a shift threat landscape. These enhanced tactics help providers better monitor system traffic, predict and troubleshoot DNS attacks, detect anomalies, reduce latency and adjust DNS routing automatically to optimize system loads.

Just as the popularity of cloud computing continues to grow due to the scalability and flexibility benefits it offers, managed DNS solutions continue to improve to help ensure high availability and performance for cloud-based services and applications. As the volume of worldwide digital traffic increases, so too does the need for fast, robust, and reliable managed DNS solutions.