Welcome to the second part of our domain security checklist, and congratulations for checking Part 1 off your list. Here, with the help of our CTO Anouar Adlani, we’re sticking to strategic topics, and laying down the framework for safe change management for your domain cybersecurity.
This discussion covers change logging, responsibilities, and DNS zones and records to improve your Corporate Domain Management strategies. We’ll also cover DNS servers and zones in more detail during parts 4 and 5 of the domain cybersecurity checklist, so this guide puts you in great stead going forward. That being said, let’s get into it.
Domain Cybersecurity Strategy 2: Change management
Change management demands a top spot in anyone’s domain cybersecurity checklist, simply because it provides you with the information you need to protect your infrastructure. As a set of cybersecurity tools and principles, change management lets you track and control changes, helping businesses reduce risks and achieve compliance. Without change management protocols, teams struggle to reverse infrastructural issues with their domains, or even notice that they’ve occurred.
Therefore, robust businesses validate, track, or cancel any changes to their domains and DNS.
Logging
It’s impossible to react to malicious or unwanted changes to your domain cybersecurity if you don’t even notice they’ve happened. To take a proactive stance towards domain operation management, establish a logging system on your domains. Activity logs let you audit the various accesses and changes applied to your account. Ultimately, this delivers two main advantages: traceability and transparency. Change logging provides traceability with a clear history of modifications to your domain infrastructure. It also establishes transparency with a window of visibility into who made which changes and why.
With effective logging, any change will create an immutable time-stamped log entry associated with a user account and IP address. Working with Corporate Domain Management experts and establishing a regular internal review of your activity logs also creates a safe, sustainable domain security posture.
Separation of duties
Logging any changes establishes an important first step for operations management. However, businesses must also maintain control over these changes to keep their business safe. The separation of duties principle supports this goal. Business leaders ensure each team member takes on specific responsibilities and specific rights with their company’s domains. This way, businesses improve their quality control, collaboration, and compliance, while reducing risks to their infrastructure.
Firstly, businesses setup a clear list of duties towards the domain, a clear list of stakeholders, and an effective change validation policy. The best policies require multiple stakeholders to create changes, in 4 or 6-eye validation protocols. These protocols mitigate hacks and human error by ensuring multiple responsible team members oversee any changes. This minimizes the risks of introducing bugs or breaking existing features, and ensures only vetted and tested changes deploy on your domains. By separating duties and instituting validation policies, business enforce secure operations management and keep any regulators and auditors happy too.
Versioning of DNS updates with cybersecurity in mind
Versioning of DNS zones refers to a practice of maintaining multiple versions of the DNS configuration for a domain. This protocol follows the reversibility principle, mitigating infrastructural crises by providing quick rollbacks to previous versions whenever needed. In case of emergencies or errors, your business always has a back-up to rely on, and we can also see exactly what changed between the two versions. Without DNS zone versioning, hacks and technical errors pose unique threats to your team. They’re forced to “guess” what changed, when it changed, and by who changed it, in case anything goes wrong involving DNS configuration. Versioning ultimately makes auditing, change monitoring, and data-led strategies far easier for everyone involved.
External DNS record monitoring
As we know, your domains mean more than just addresses and web pages. They also underpin vital services like emails, apps, and more. Businesses with a firm grip on their domain cybersecurity make sure they monitor DNS records, to manage any changes to your domains that could impact these vital services. Effective DNS record monitoring delivers real-time security, detecting unauthorized DNS changes and anticipating DNS hijacks and spoofing attacks. It also helps track performance and availability, ensuring your DNS resolves correctly and tracking any issues affecting user experience.
DNS monitoring forms an essential part of any organization’s efforts to ensure global accessibility, performance, and security of your web services.
Conclusions: Change management and domain cybersecurity
In conclusion, while change brings challenges to your domain cybersecurity, operations management strategies turn weaknesses into strengths. Establishing tools like activity logs, 6-eye validation, versioning, and monitoring safeguard your changes, and foster sustainable business growth.
That being said, we’re ready for the next topic on this checklist, domain name protection. Part 3’s topic explores crucial protective measures like transfer and registry locks, domain renewals, and expiration strategies. We’ll see you there! Until then, if you’re interested in more details about what’s possible with Corporate Domain Management, check out our dedicated solutions page. You can also implement this checklist with your needs front and centre, by getting in touch with the team today.
