The 12 Questions Every CISO Should Ask Before Buying Protective DNS

Protective DNS has moved from nice-to-have to named control: the NSA, CISA and the UK's NCSC all now formally recommend it, and GCC frameworks increasingly assume it. That mainstream status has crowded the market — and made vendor datasheets nearly indistinguishable. Everyone blocks phishing. Everyone has threat intelligence. Everyone has a dashboard.

The real differences live one layer down, in architecture and operational detail. These twelve questions expose them. Put them in your RFP verbatim; the answers will separate marketing from engineering within a single meeting.

Questions 1–4: Where Does My Data Actually Go?

DNS queries are a live transcript of your organization's behaviour — every application, every user, every dependency. Before evaluating detection quality, establish where that transcript travels and who can read it.

Insist on architectural answers, not policy answers. 'We comply with local regulations' is a policy answer; 'resolution and logs are processed in region X, and here is the data-flow diagram' is an architectural one. If a provider cannot name the geography of processing for both resolution and logging, residency is a promise, not a property.

• 1. In which countries are my queries resolved, and can I pin resolution to a region?
• 2. Where are query logs stored, for how long, and who — including your staff — can access them?
• 3. Can you contractually guarantee my DNS data never leaves my jurisdiction?
• 4. What happens to my logs and policies if we terminate the contract?

Questions 5–8: How Good Is the Detection, Really?

Blocklist coverage is table stakes; the attacks that hurt are the ones no feed has seen. Domain Generation Algorithms mint thousands of disposable domains per day, and slow, low-and-slow DNS tunnels deliberately trickle data below volume thresholds to stay invisible to rule-based systems. Detecting those requires behavioural machine learning over live telemetry, not just list lookups.

Ask each vendor to demonstrate — on live traffic, not slides — how they catch a domain registered an hour ago, a tunnel moving two hundred bytes per minute, and a DGA family that emerged this quarter. Ask what percentage of their blocks come from their own analytics versus licensed third-party feeds; the ratio tells you whether you are buying a detection engine or a reseller.

• 5. How do you detect DGA domains and newly registered domains with no reputation history?
• 6. Show me how you catch slow / low-and-slow DNS tunneling that stays under volume thresholds.
• 7. What share of your detections originates from your own AI/analytics vs third-party feeds?
• 8. What is your measured false-positive rate, and what is the workflow to unblock?

Questions 9–12: Will It Fit How We Actually Operate?

The last four questions decide whether the platform survives contact with your environment: encrypted DNS adoption, distributed sites and roaming users, MSP or multi-entity structures, and — if you also host public zones — the custody of your DNSSEC signing keys.

Multi-tenancy deserves particular attention in the GCC, where holding groups, government entities and MSPs routinely manage dozens of subsidiaries. Per-tenant policy, per-tenant logging and per-tenant reporting must be native, not simulated with account workarounds.

• 9. Do you support encrypted resolution (DoH/DoT) for my endpoints, and can you surface unmanaged encrypted DNS on my network?
• 10. How do roaming users, branch sites and cloud workloads get the same policy?
• 11. Is multi-tenancy native — separate policies, logs and reports per entity or customer?
• 12. If you also provide authoritative DNS: where do zone data and DNSSEC keys live, and who controls them?

How DNS Armor Answers

We built DNS Armor around these questions because they are the ones our own customers asked. Resolution and logging pinned to sovereign regions across the GCC. Detection led by behavioural machine learning and LLM domain analysis — including slow tunnels, DGAs and zero-day domains — with reactive domain discovery feeding blocks in near real time. Encrypted resolution for endpoints. Native multi-tenancy for MSPs and groups. And with DNS Armor Resolve, authoritative zones whose configurations and signing keys never leave the geography you assign.

Whatever platform you choose, ask all twelve questions — and keep the answers in writing.