DNS role
Domain Name System (DNS) is a key element in Internet performances providing information critical to the operation of most Internet applications and services by translating domain names to real IP addresses; for example the number “192.198.164.158″ is the IP address for “www.intel.com.”
DNS service is increasing
Over the past few years the demand of DNS services have increased tenfold, and can be attributed to several factors: (1) increased registration of Domain names; (2) increased deployment of hand held devices requiring access to the internet; (3) increased number and severity of malicious infrastructure attacks; and (4) the rollout of new services and applications along with expanding migration to the cloud.
The overwhelming demand for services has been driven in part by the corresponding increase in registered names over the past several years. According to Verisign five million domain names were added to the Internet in the fourth quarter of 2013 alone, bringing the total number of registered worldwide domain names to 271 million, up from 183 million domain names at the end of 2009. Contrast that with 1995, when there were only 70,000 domains in existence.
Adding to the growing demand for internet access and DNS services is the sale of new smart phones, up 38% to 204 million units in 2013, and tablets, up 40% to 53.5 million units, along with related increases in the availability of downloadable apps and embedded advertisements being pushed to mobile users over the internet. Moreover, these hand held devices are instrumental in the adoption of consumer and enterprise Internet-of-Things apps, which according to IDC the globally installed base of IoT could reach 212 billion things by the end of 2020, including 30.1 billion installed and connected autonomous things.
Another other contributing factor, albeit of negative consequences, is the increase in the number of infrastructure attacks which is up more than 200 percent over the past couple of years. These Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are designed to overwhelm a connection with traffic until they unable to handle the scale of data being requested or sent in an attempt to take that web property offline, create network outages and disrupt business, often costing firms millions.
These market factors have huge implications on large organizations and service providers as they continually look to add capacity and infrastructure at significant added costs in order to scale their DNS services to meet the continually increasing demands imposed on their networks, but trying to do so with the objective of lowering the total cost of ownership of their network infrastructure.