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Topic starter
23/06/2026 7:02 pm
TL;DR: DNS disaster recovery is about keeping name resolution available through outages, provider failures, misconfiguration, and disaster scenarios, according to DigiCert. The central lesson is that resilience depends on redundancy, monitoring, and failover, because DNS remains the foundation that many identity and service delivery flows quietly depend on.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by DigiCert: Disaster Recovery for DNS
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should organisations build DNS disaster recovery into identity and access planning?
A: Treat DNS as part of the identity control plane, not just hosting infrastructure.
Q: Why does DNS failure matter for NHI and machine identity programmes?
A: Machine identity flows often depend on DNS for token exchange, certificate validation, directory lookups, and service discovery.
Q: What breaks when an organisation has only one DNS provider?
A: A single DNS provider creates a shared failure point for websites, APIs, authentication services, and internal resolution.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory identity-dependent DNS paths List every authentication, certificate, workload, and service-discovery flow that fails if DNS becomes unavailable.
- Establish secondary resolution paths Use a secondary DNS provider or alternate hosting model for mission-critical zones, and test failover before an outage.
- Monitor for record drift and resolver anomalies Alert on unexpected zone changes, abnormal query patterns, availability drops, and misconfiguration signals.
What's in the full article
DigiCert's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- Step-by-step DNS disaster recovery planning guidance for choosing primary and secondary providers.
- Practical discussion of DNS failover and monitoring options for mission-critical services.
- Examples of backup and DRaaS approaches for IT-related outages and service restoration.
- Checklist items for compliance, communication, insurance, and supplier-related concerns.
👉 Read DigiCert's guide to DNS disaster recovery planning →
DNS disaster recovery: what happens when name resolution fails?
Explore further
25/06/2026 2:49 am
DNS availability is an identity dependency, not just a web operations problem. When name resolution fails, authentication endpoints, certificate validation paths, and service discovery can fail with it. That makes DNS continuity relevant to human IAM, machine identity, and application access flows, even though the blog frames it as site uptime. Practitioners should treat DNS as part of identity service resilience, not as a separate infrastructure afterthought.
A few things that frame the scale:
- The average estimated time to remediate a leaked secret is 27 days, despite 75% of organisations expressing strong confidence in their secrets management capabilities, according to The State of Secrets in AppSec.
- Only 44% of developers are reported to follow security best practices for secrets management, exposing a significant developer behaviour gap.
A question worth separating out:
Q: Who should own DNS disaster recovery accountability?
A: Ownership should sit with the teams responsible for service availability, identity dependencies, and infrastructure resilience together. DNS recovery is not only a network task, because it affects authentication, application access, and supplier continuity. Governance should assign explicit accountability for testing failover, monitoring, and recovery execution.
👉 Read our full editorial: DNS disaster recovery exposes the cost of single-point failure
