By Enterprise security strategies often focus on the obvious: endpoint protection, identity, access controls, and zero trust frameworks. But according to Patrick Sullivan, CTO of Security Strategy at Akamai, there’s a critical foundational layer that too often gets ignored—DNS.
“DNS is often sort of a forgotten service, but it’s so fundamental to everything we do,” says Sullivan. The reason? “Most of the time it works. And when it works, it’s invisible.”
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This invisibility is deceptive. DNS quietly underpins every internet transaction, every lookup, every connection. It’s also where vulnerabilities can lie dormant for months—until they become the root cause of major outages or breaches.
“There’s actually a famous haiku in IT,” Sullivan notes. “It’s DNS. It can’t be DNS. It was DNS.”
Akamai, known for its edge services and security solutions, has recently made DNS Posture Management a focus area. Why? Because organizations continue to depend heavily on DNS not just for availability, but as a cornerstone of broader security policies.
When DNS is misconfigured or outdated, it opens up a range of attack vectors. From cache poisoning to DDoS to command-and-control callbacks, malicious actors know how to exploit DNS blind spots. And as businesses shift toward distributed architectures and hybrid environments, the potential blast radius of DNS issues only increases.
“Not only is there a lot of dependency on DNS from an availability perspective, but also other elements of security are closely intertwined with DNS,” says Sullivan. “If DNS isn’t quite right, a lot of risk emerges. And that’s a pattern that we’ve seen over many, many years.”
Managing DNS posture isn’t just about uptime anymore—it’s about visibility, policy enforcement, and proactive threat detection. Sullivan’s comments suggest Akamai sees DNS as a key control point in a modern security architecture, and is developing tools and practices accordingly.
As security teams begin to re-evaluate foundational infrastructure, DNS deserves a fresh look—not as background plumbing, but as a strategic layer for resilience and defense.
