Managing Your Domain: Making The Complicated Simple

No company would scatter its departments and employees all over town without good reason. Keeping an organization tightly knit is how a company effectively manages its operations and gets things done each day.

If a company wouldn’t intentionally locate its physical resources in random places, why would it do the same with its virtual resources? By consolidating mail servers, sender policy framework (SPF) records and domains into the same hub through domain name system (DNS) management, operations are made more efficient, and that efficiency gets passed on to customers.

The Advantages of DNS Management

DNS management systems bring all of a company’s domains under a single control panel. When something needs to be altered on a domain or data needs gathering, there’s no need to remember where to look, because everything is already in one place. It’s the equivalent of taking all the files from marketing, accounts payable, human resources and IT in four separate locations and moving them to a single data system that can be accessed from anyplace in the building.

Zone delegation within the DNS management system still allows domains to be split over multiple servers and managed by different people. This enables companies to have everything in one place but still allow each department to take care of their own data.

The Advantages to Customers

With consolidation comes efficiency. With everything in one place, when a customer query comes in, everyone at the company knows exactly where to access the information the customer needs. This decreases response time to customer queries, creating a better customer experience.

Since a DNS management system is accessible from anywhere, a business never has to be closed to customer interaction. By providing some individuals at a company with full access to every zone of the management system, a few people will always be available to answer customer inquiries, resulting in continuous productivity.

The Advantages of Consolidated Records

In order to make sense of given commands, data generally requires other data. One can’t command a file to act as a stand-in for another file, for instance, if both files aren’t on the same system. Similarly, a domain can’t be split into subdomains over several servers if all those servers can’t see each other. Simply put, the more data interacts, the more it can be manipulated.

DNS management allows for such manipulation. Canonical name (CNAME) records, for instance, can be created for aliases of domain names based on how users may type the name into a search engine. With a CNAME record, a company can make sure anyone who types in extra characters, such as “www.” or an extra backslash, will still end up at the right URL.

Along with easier management and an enhanced capability to manipulate data, good DNS management generally results in increased uptime. When all data is controlled from one panel, there’s only one place problems can stem from, which makes finding and solving problems a quicker, simpler process. Since cloud companies that provide domain hosting and services often provide the use of their management system for free, there’s no reason any business owner or manager shouldn’t exploit this powerful tool at his or her disposal.