security What Is The Domain Name System And Why Does It Matter?

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The Domain Name System (DNS) is one of the most critical parts of the internet’s infrastructure, and yet most executives know next to nothing about it. In this article, I hope to remedy that by introducing you to the basics of DNS and explaining why it’s so important.

DNS underpins all important services that run over the internet, including the World Wide Web, email, messaging and more. In some cases, you can tell that a service relies on DNS because the addresses used by the service incorporate domain names, which are indexes into DNS’s distributed database.

Your company probably runs a number of name servers. (To give you an idea of scale, when I helped run HP’s DNS infrastructure, we had hundreds of name servers.) Some of those name servers are primarily responsible for resolving domain names associated with organizations on the internet. Some examples: resolving www.google.com to an IP address or a few IP addresses so that your employees can use Google’s search facility, or resolving the domain name in a colleague’s email address to mail routing information so that your employees can send their co-workers emails. We call these recursive name servers...

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