TL;DR: Managed DNS is presented as a way to improve website performance, preserve availability during failures, and strengthen DNS integrity with DNSSEC, according to DigiCert. The underlying governance issue is that DNS reliability and authenticity are now identity-adjacent control points, not just infrastructure concerns.
NHIMG editorial — based on content published by DigiCert: Best Enterprise DNS in Johannesburg, South Africa
Questions worth separating out
Q: How should security teams govern DNS for identity-dependent applications?
A: Treat DNS as part of the access path, not just as infrastructure plumbing.
Q: Why does DNSSEC matter for identity and access management?
A: DNSSEC matters because it helps verify that DNS answers have not been altered before a user or workload reaches the target service.
Q: What breaks when managed DNS has no failover plan?
A: When managed DNS has no failover plan, critical services can become unreachable even if the application itself is healthy.
Practitioner guidance
- Inventory identity-dependent DNS paths Document which login, API, certificate, and service discovery flows depend on specific DNS zones, resolvers, and failover records.
- Enable DNSSEC on critical domains Sign the zones that support user access, machine access, and externally reachable services.
- Test secondary DNS and failover recovery Run failure exercises that force DNS switchover and confirm that applications, authentication endpoints, and API consumers continue resolving correctly.
What's in the full article
DigiCert's full blog covers the operational detail this post intentionally leaves for the source:
- How DigiCert positions managed DNS for Johannesburg-based enterprise performance and regional availability
- The specific DNSSEC and secondary DNS capabilities described in the source article
- The vendor's explanation of failover behaviour when primary servers or network paths fail
- The service framing around DigiCert DNS Trust Manager and its operational context
👉 Read DigiCert's blog on managed DNS for performance, security, and availability →
Managed DNS in Johannesburg: are your DNS controls resilient enough?
Explore further
Managed DNS is now an identity-adjacent control, not just an uptime tool. The article frames DNS availability and DNS integrity as business essentials, but the deeper lesson is that authentication journeys depend on DNS behaving correctly before an identity control ever fires. That makes DNS a prerequisite trust layer for human IAM, NHI service access, and workload reachability. Practitioners should stop treating DNS as background infrastructure and govern it as part of the access path.
A few things that frame the scale:
- 85% of organisations lack full visibility into third-party vendors connected via OAuth apps, with 38% having no or low visibility and a further 47% having only partial visibility, according to The State of Non-Human Identity Security.
- Another finding from The State of Non-Human Identity Security shows that only 1.5 out of 10 organisations are highly confident in securing NHIs, which is a useful benchmark when evaluating any identity-adjacent dependency.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What frameworks help teams align DNS resilience with security governance?
A: The NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 is a useful starting point because it ties identify, protect, detect, respond, and recover together. Teams should map DNS ownership and recovery requirements into those functions so that authenticity and availability are treated as governed controls rather than separate operational tasks.
👉 Read our full editorial: Managed DNS resilience and DNSSEC controls for enterprise domains