Every part of an organization relies on digital services and their supporting infrastructures. From applications used for daily operations to the services the company delivers to customers, ensuring that people can access the online technologies they need is mission-critical. While recent research indicates that outage frequency and severity appear to be decreasing, 27% of operators reported experiencing a significant, serious, or severe outage over the last three years. According to respondents, these outages came with significant costs:
- 54% reported that a significant, serious, or severe outage cost over $100,000
- 16% reported that the most recent outage cost more than $1 million.
As organizations struggle to maintain or improve revenue, reducing the cost of service downtime by monitoring and managing DNS becomes increasingly important.
What Are the Most Common Causes of Service Downtimes?
To minimize disruptions and maintain seamless service delivery, organizations should prepare for and mitigate risks arising from these five common causes of outages:
- Cyberattacks: Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and ransomware campaigns intentionally disrupt service availability to extort organizations or advance threat actor objectives.
- Human error: Manually managing tasks like updating DNS records, configuring security settings, and monitoring performance can lead to misconfigurations that disrupt services.
- Networking issues: Overloading a DNS server with requests or queries can introduce latency or cause a service outage.
- Hardware errors: Physical components like servers and routers are prone to unexpected breakdowns, impacting service availability.
- Power outages: Entire data centers can be taken offline during power disruptions, especially when redundancy or backup systems are lacking.
Best Way to Calculate Service Downtime Costs?
Calculating the costs of service downtime requires organizations to consider direct and indirect costs .
Direct Costs
A service outage’s direct costs are:
- Recovery costs: immediate expenses for system repairs, hardware replacements, and software recovery efforts
- Productivity and efficiency: delays in product or service delivery, which lead to higher long-term operational costs related to meeting customer needs after restoring service
Indirect Costs
A service outage’s indirect costs are:
- Reputation damage: negative customer experiences and lost trust arising from delays, lost data, or inability to access services
- Reduced productivity: service outages blamed on internal groups, leading to distrust and a lack of collaboration
- Customer churn and lost opportunities: current or potential customers switching to competitors when unable to complete transactions
- Employee morale: frustration and uncertainty from frequent service outages and their operational impacts, leading to high turnover and difficulty acquiring new talent
- Data loss: disrupted transactions leading to data corruption, leakage, or deletion
What is DNS Monitoring, and Why Is It Important?
As the backbone of the internet, DNS translates domain names into IP addresses, enabling users to access websites. Effective DNS monitoring ensures that these services are consistently available, preventing downtime that could impact business operations and user access.
Proactive DNS monitoring supports operational effectiveness and efficiency by:
- Detecting DNS-based attacks, like DDoS or cache poisoning
- Assessing latency to identify misconfigurations that degrade performance
- Ensuring DNS record accuracy for reliable service uptime
Core Capabilities That Maximize DNS Uptime
To gain the full value of DNS monitoring, you should consider the following key capabilities and functionalities of any solution you use.
Failover
Mitigating server failure risk is critical for any web-based business operation. A failover mechanism automatically modifies the DNS response record for the monitored server to keep key domains available. By monitoring a group of A/AAAA or CNAME records, you gain visibility into server availability.
Key capabilities to look for include:
- Global monitoring agents
- Pre-configured thresholds for determining whether tests have failed
- Automatic initiation of failover
- Alerting of appropriate staff
- Automatic recognition of the server’s online status
- Automatic restoration of DNS response records
Load Balancing
Load balancing helps you keep traffic spread out across multiple servers so that no single one needs to bear the brunt of all requests. At the cloud infrastructure level, load balancing typically means sending HTTP(S) GET or POST requests at regular intervals to ensure that the target system responds within an appropriate period of time.
By spreading the traffic across multiple servers and monitoring their response times, you can improve overall performance.
For more information about load balancing, check out DNS Load Balancing With Global Traffic Director.
Strengthen Your DNS Strategy with Reliable Performance and Uptime
By addressing common causes of downtime and understanding both the direct and indirect costs involved, organizations can take practical steps to safeguard service availability. Proactive DNS monitoring—paired with robust failover and load balancing—reduces vulnerabilities, cuts recovery time, and supports customer trust.
DNS Made Easy provides high-performance DNS services designed for high availability, fast resolution, and automatic failover. With a global IP Anycast+ network and 100% uptime history, DNS Made Easy gives organizations the tools they need to stay online, perform at peak speed, and avoid the costs of preventable outages.
Ready to strengthen your DNS strategy? Contact us.
