Two years ago, Amazon, Comcast, Twitter and Netflix were effectively taken off the Internet for multiple hours by a DDoS attack because they all relied on a single DNS provider. Can it happen again?
According to the 2018 ThousandEyes Global DNS Performance Report, 68% of the top 50 companies in the Fortune 500 and 72% of companies on the Financial Times Stock Exchange 100 are still at risk. Two years after that DDoS attack, you'd think digital companies would have learned their lesson, but apparently not so.
According to the report, many of the biggest companies on the planet – as well as 44% of the top 25 SaaS providers – don't have a fallback DNS server option. That means that a single outage or DDoS attack could completely take their businesses off the Internet.
Many of the biggest companies on the planet don't have a fallback DNS server option
DNS is the "phone book of the Internet." It's the first step in how humans connect to online brands because it's the Internet infrastructure that translates human-readable domain names to routable IP addresses. Without DNS, there is no digital experience. It's the least appreciated aspect of delivering online user experience, and the most overlooked chink in an enterprise's armor.
Even digitally mature organizations can get DNS wrong by not following best practices around resiliency. It's also a complex topic that most networking professionals haven't spent enough time to understand.
The DNS expert community is select, but the need for awareness of DNS has grown as more businesses than ever rely on digital experiences in their revenue generation. According to Gartner, CIOs report that 37% of their revenues will be have a digital footprint by 2020. If DNS is the first step in every digital experience, than not getting that step right can be incredibly costly.
As for the lack of enterprise DNS resiliency, consider this analogy. Most IT professionals would never consider building a data center without backup power or redundant telecom or Internet connections. Further, most know that redundant connectivity isn't truly redundant unless there is diversity of physical cable routes and facilities. But too many are just using a single DNS service. If that DNS "power" gets cut, it doesn't matter how much you spend on your CDN, your regional cloud hosting, etc. Your brand will be offline and you'll be scrambling.
