How exciting launching a new product sounds, right? But if you have ever been involved in launching a complex SaaS environment, you must know how crucial it is to have domains and subdomains up to date and accessible. And the most annoying – domain login lost in someone’s local files, or having a launch delayed because one small part of the service has an expired domain.
In these complex tasks, we don’t remember when we forget the simple tasks – domain management is one of those. With so many large-scale moving parts, it’s easy for digital teams, especially at the enterprise level, to overlook something so fundamental as domain ownership.
Landing pages, app subdomains, regional brands and partner integrations are all based on the same invisible infrastructure. Companies at the top need to enhance their security controls, and the most important thing is that centralized domain management is the core of it.
Excited to explore it more? Keep reading this article to understand what a centralized domain looks like in modern workflows.
Key Takeaways
- Modern centralized domain control can help you keep your systems safe and privacy updated.
- It can make an infrastructure more connected and automated to keep things at the right pace.
- It is a better way to keep many of the system controls in a common place.
See, the real problem with domain ownership not being centrally managed is how black and white the breakpoint is. It doesn’t tend to crack, it breaks suddenly and brings the whole service to an abrupt halt. Problems stay hidden until something critical fails.
And for the most part, the breakdown is mainly based on the one dreaded thing that IT teams hate to see coming: human error. Domain vulnerabilities are usually due to neglect from the inside, rather than an attack from the outside. Hacking is much further down the list of culprits when it comes to losing a domain.
Things like an expired credit card, a key employee leaving the business, poor handovers, even a shared spreadsheet being overwritten. These are all small and silly errors that cause downtime from an offline domain. And it’s often not just downtime, in some circumstances, this can be a compliance and brand risk that may take weeks to rectify.
So what is centralised control covering, I hear you ask. Well, as it says on the tin, it’s one secure, visible system that houses all domains, DNS records and the means to update them. No more scattered platforms or spreadsheets for managing renewal dates. The organisation has full ownership of each entity and centrally manages the expiry and renewal process of all domains, behind one set of credentials.
Being able to see every domain, who it is used by and when it expires, is what helps digital teams stay on top of things, before they become an issue. And role based access allows each different stakeholder to go about their business without stepping on each other’s toes. Marketing can oversee the branding, IT can manage the records, finance can keep the payments up to date, everyone is happy.
And then there is the opportunity to take advantage of automation. Renewal notices, SSL implementation, DNS propagation are all things that can be configured into the system.
In large organisations, this model often evolves into something bigger: becoming a domain reseller internally. Instead of every team purchasing and operating their own domains, the company basically becomes its own registrar. It’s like a single and trusted provider of digital real estate, that allows for full control, governance and efficiency.
Interesting Fact
According to the industry data, more than 50% of the domain-related outages in large organizations are caused by internal mismanagement.
One of the common myths around centralised control is that it makes teams slower. In practice, good teams know that a good system is the key to speed.
The positive impact centralised domain control has on the workflow is immeasurable. New environments, both production and staging are spun up seamlessly and certificates can get deployed automatically with CI/CD pipelines.
Dev teams don’t have to wait for Marketing to supply the DNS access and Marketing can make minor edits without having to bother IT.
Any new regions that are added, the domain structure can be replicated exactly and at lightning speed. For rebrands, things like redirects, renewals, and SSLs are all delivered as bundles. The predictability and guardrails mean everyone involved can move faster than ever.
How is this tackled from an operations perspective? Well, the first step is gathering an exhaustive inventory. Remove duplicates and trim away any fat. Select a premium registrar that offers a wholesale management platform and then go to town on the allocations and automations.
As infrastructure becomes more automated and interconnected, domain management needs to keep pace. Centralised systems are becoming foundational for how teams work at scale.
As the regulation becomes strict, governance turns non-negotiable. Role-based access, documented ownership, and system-level accountability are essential.
The teams that succeed won’t treat domain control as a back-office task. They’ll build it into their infrastructure from day one, automated, secure, and ready to scale.
Does it help to keep all your credentials safe?
Yes, along with the credentials, it also helps to secure your systems and reduce risks.
