Modern applications and digital services depend on DNS as their critical entry point. Any disruption in DNS can lead to outages that impact user experience and business continuity. To mitigate these risks, organizations increasingly adopt multi-provider DNS strategies to enhance resiliency and reduce single points of failure. By leveraging more than one DNS provider, businesses can maintain consistent resolution even during provider outages or network incidents. One widely used approach to achieve this is Secondary DNS, which provides synchronized redundancy and ensures uninterrupted access to applications and services.
What is Secondary DNS?
Secondary DNS, sometimes referred to as backup DNS, is a configuration in which a DNS zone is hosted by more than one DNS provider or infrastructure. One provider acts as the primary, holding the authoritative zone file. The secondary provider receives synchronized copies of that zone data and responds authoritatively to DNS queries just like the primary.
When a domain uses Secondary DNS:
In a primary/secondary DNS configuration, both providers actively serve queries, ensuring your domain is resolvable at all times. ‘Primary’ and ‘Secondary’ refer only to how the zone data is maintained and synchronized – not to how traffic is routed. For example, your secondary data may handle as many or even more queries than the primary, especially in setups where you host the primary zone on your own servers and rely on the secondary for global delivery. This dual-provider approach ensures your applications, websites and email remain accessible worldwide, even if one provider experiences performance issues, network disruption or a security event.
Who Should Use Secondary DNS?
Secondary DNS is a valuable strategy for any organization that:
Why is Secondary DNS Important?
primary or secondary DNS provider offers profound advantages, extending beyond simple redundancy:
High-Performance Global DNS Network
NS1 Connect operations a globally distributed, high-availability DNS network engineered for low-latency resolution and high throughput. As a secondary provider, it provides an additional resilient DNS footprint capable of handling production-scale traffic.
Reliable and Efficient Zone Transfer Support
NS1 Connect fully supports AXFR and IXFR transfers, enabling timely and seamless synchronization with your primary DNS provider. The platform includes built-in monitoring and alerting to ensure zone data remains consistent and up to date.
Future-Proofing with Room to Grow
Many organizations start with a simple DNS deployment and grow into advanced routing, traffic steering or global load balancing. While features like Filter Chains and advanced traffic-steering logic, such as Pulsar, are not used in secondary configurations, choosing NS1 Connect as secondary provides a clear path to adopt these advanced capabilities later by switching NS1 Connect to primary when ready.
Strong Compatibility and Multi-Provider Flexibility
NS1 Connect is designed to work smoothly with a wide range of primary DNS providers – whether SaaS based, cloud-native or on-premises. This makes it easy to integrate NS1 Connect into multi-provider and hybrid DNS architectures.
Teams using automation and infrastructure-as-code frameworks benefit from NS1 Connects modern API-first design. This ensures consistency across environments and simplifies large-scale DNS operations.
Enhanced Security with DNSSEC
NS1 Connect preserves DNSSEC signatures when acting as a secondary provider, ensuring cryptographic integrity and protecting against DNS spoofing. This means your zones remain secure and compliant without sacrificing redundancy.
How to Implement Secondary DNS with NS1 Connect
Implementing Secondary DNS in NS1 Connect is straightforward:
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Configure NS1 Connect as the Secondary
Create a secondary zone and designate your existing provider as the primary. NS1 Connect will begin pulling zone updates using AXFR or IXFR.
Authorize NS1 Connect transfer servers on your primary provider to enable secure zone transfers.
Update both the primary zone and your domain registrar to include both your primary DNS provider’s name servers and NS1 Connect name servers. This signals that both providers are authoritative for your domain.
NS1 Connect continuously monitors zone transfer status and keeps DNS data synchronized.
You can read a step by step guide in our NS1 Connect Documentation Center:
While Secondary DNS using zone transfers (AXFR/IXFR) provides significant benefits, including redundancy, it has inherent limitations. Propagation of changes can be slower compared to API-driven synchronization, and advanced traffic steering features are unavailable in secondary mode. Additionally, updates still depend on the primary provider, which can create operational constraints in dynamic environments.
To overcome these constraints, IBM Cloud Sync offers near real-time synchronization between providers and unlocks advanced capabilities like traffic steering. It’s a simple way to add speed and intelligence to your multi-provider DNS strategy.
For organizations using Amazon Route 53 as their primary or secondary DNS, NS1 Connect pairs seamlessly with IBM Cloud Sync, which automatically synchronizes DNS zones, records and metadata, such as traffic steering policies, between these two providers. This reduces operational overhead and ensures high-fidelity replication.
With NS1 Connect as either primary or secondary, you can easily implement Secondary DNS to help ensure your DNS infrastructure is ready for whatever challenges come your way. With NS1 Connect, you gain a robust, flexible, feature-rich and future-proof foundation for DNS operations. It not only protects your business today but it also positions you to adopt advanced traffic management and automation capabilities as your needs evolve.
Contact our sales team to learn more about implementing Secondary DNS with NS1 Connect and explore how it can strengthen your DNS strategy.