by Janus Boye
Gavin Colborne on stage in late 2019 introducing his work on domain discovery to the Boye community
It is an incredible surprise to most people when they see just how large their digital estate has become over the years. Clearly, if you don’t have a grasp on your domains, it can have far-reaching consequences, both legally and financially.
Gavin Colborne from Little Forest in the UK has worked with this issue for almost a decade. He recently shared his latest and greatest thinking on the problem in a member conference call. As he said:
Existing domain management approaches come up short. In a nutshell, it’s all about brand protection.
Below I’ve shared my notes from the call and you can also find the slides and additional details on domain discovery.
Why its good to find all your websites?
To illustrate the size and scale of the problem, Gavin took a look at higher education and shared some notable examples:
The University of Copenhagen has some 8,500 domains
Technische Universität München has almost 30,000 domains
Oxford in the UK is nearing 100,000 domains
Columbia in New York City comes up at currently 142,500 domains
How do you possibly manage this? As illustrated just by the response during the call, website sprawl also happens outside the top universities. Large, complex and global organisations struggle with this and so do smaller firms. Beyond protecting your brand, Gavin listed these main reasons for tackling the problem:
Information accuracy
Security
Compliance with regulation
Customer experience
Accessibility
Quality
Sustainability
If you take a step back, these are problems familiar to almost all organisations. With unclear ownership of domains, sites and digital experience platforms, you end up with a poor customer experience due to low quality and fragmentation.
How to do a domain discovery and address the problem
At Little Forest, they use several sub-domain finding tools to guarantee complete coverage. Data is gathered from:
DNS entries
SSL Certificates entries
Search engines results
Consider the domain structure of Google to illustrate how your domains can spread out both horizontal and vertical
According to Gavin, automated discovery can produce incredibly valuable data for business, but it also creates tons of hay to hide the needles in.
As an example, Gavin shared how an automated discovery on the harvard.edu domain found 8000 sub-domains starting with “dhcp.” That is 8% of the total of their estate. It is important to be able to find these and then hide them once a human has reviewed the basic rule.
Gavin also made it clear that domain management tools don’t solve the issues of Domain Discovery. You still need to factor in governance like business ownership and quality measurement.
During the call, our member Guy Pucill from Copenhagen-based healthcare firm Radiometer shared advice from their approach:
The key is having centralized DNS management for all brand domains. This took us 2 years to complete but has helped operations immensely.
As Simon Jones from UK-based digital agency Studio 24 added:
Centralised DNS management is the way to go. Many of our clients have domains managed across multiple providers
Learn more about domain discovery
Gavin won the notable Small Feature Award in 2019 with a brief demo on domain discovery. The judges called it a simple solution to a huge problem.
You can also download the slides (PDF) that Gavin used in the call or lean back and enjoy the 28-minute recording below.