BlueCat acquires Men&Mice to boost its DNS, DHCP and IP address management platform and help organizations improve network resiliency and simplify network management.

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Why do I need DNS management?

Poor or error-ridden DNS management can be a major cause for expensive downtime in corporate networks. These disruptive outages can be avoided with proper planning and selecting the right management processes and tools.

DNSis one of the most critical aspects of any network’s availability. In an always-connected and technologically diverse world, it is essential for companies that want to have full visibility, authority, and control across networks at all times. As cloud-based systems, edge services, and the rapid growth of IoT devices are driving infrastructure growth, a well-managed DNS not only harnesses the full potential of DNS, but is also built to scale and change, no matter how complex or simple, to support the needs of the business.

What is DNS Management?

DNS management is the process of maintaining DNS infrastructure (name servers and caching servers, DNS zones and records) and managing redundancy and security to ensure uptime.

Good DNS management helps companies prepare and adapt their networks for challenges and growth. As more devices join the network via Internet of Things connectivity edge systems, the reliance on DNS steadily increases. DNS management can also support the growth of big data and analytics.

DNS management is the process of maintaining DNS infrastructure (name servers and caching servers, DNS zones and records) and managing redundancy and security to ensure uptime.

Good DNS management helps companies prepare and adapt their networks for challenges and growth. As more devices join the network via Internet of Things connectivity edge systems, the reliance on DNS steadily increases. DNS management can also support the growth of big data and analytics.

What are the risks of poor DNS management?

Poor or overly complex DNS management can lead to delayed updates, slow responses, bad data, potential outages and security issues like denial of service, and other problems.

What makes good DNS management?

Good DNS management:

  • Allows an organization’s network management team to simplify their complex and detailed service-level agreements (SLAs) without sacrificing response time or availability;
  • Enables network managers to have clear responsibilities across monitoring, configuration management, and security tasks;
  • Eliminates human error via automation;
  • Ensures security through granular and flexible access controls;
  • Improves overall uptime by removing single points of failure and creating cross-platform redundancies.
  • All these points equal significant cost savings, improved ROI on infrastructure assets, and more appropriate deployment of human resources.

DNS management and the cloud

As enterprise IT moves to the cloud, it unlocks highly effective cloud-based DNS. While the merits of cloud DNS are not to be understated, consolidating DNS data between on-prem or datacenter-bound networks and cloud vendors, or between different clouds, is a sizeable challenge. Proper oversight is essential in diverse, heterogeneous environments. This helps to maintain transparent communications and responsibilities to ensure uptime, smooth network functionality, and to prevent vulnerabilities.

Businesses who already made significant investments in on-prem hardware and software are often less inclined to adopt new technologies in fear of losing value. Migrating existing DNS data is often a complicated and expensive project; navigating legal compliances across geographic zones and jurisdictions to ensure data security also adds to the hurdles that companies face in scaling and updating their networks.

Good DNS management streamlines processes across multiple platforms, democratizes DNS data for easy migration, and helps mitigating DDoS attacks and other DNS failure by creating fault-tolerant redundancies.