The security benefits are well worth the times investment, OpenDNS can protect your small business network, is take a few minutes to set it up and is free and has contributed significantly to combat against the conficker worm, and it will protect your network from any number of future attacks, as a bonus, it may help your network users experience better browsing performance.

Before i describe how to do this, let’s review what the domain name system is, much as a phone book lets you look up people’s phone number by looking up their names, the DNS provide a unique address registry for computer, type in “google.com”, and DNS translates that name into a sequence of four numbers called an IP Address (for google.com, it’s 209.85.171.100).

In the overall internet infrastructure, various public, semi-public and private providers maintain a series of master phone books, or DNS root servers at strategic places around the world, the word, the root servers talk to each other regularly to ensure that they remain in sync as users add new domains, if interested parties want to “poison” an entry miss redirect internet traffic to a phony domain, they can do so with the right amount of subterfuge.

OpenDNS comes into play, normally when you set up your network, you don’t give your DNS settings another thought, if you have a cable or DSL modem, you hook it up and it automatically gets it DNS settings from the cable phone company’s DNS servers, however that you change these settings to reflect the DNS server at openDNS, this free service makes its money by serving ads when user type in domain that doesn’t exist, the OpenDNS web site provides instructions for altering your DNS settings, base on router that you use on your network.

The whole process from reading through the instructions to implementing the changes you should take you only a couple minutes, using OpenDNS has several benefits.

• You can set it up to block objectionable domains, thereby protecting your business from lawsuits
• OpenDNS block know exploit domain, which helps you and your employees avoid getting trapped by some malicious hacker.

You also get to enjoy superior DNS service thanks to OpenDNS servers, which reportedly return OpenDNS domain faster than ones for general internet, and finally the service catches common typos in domain a big plus for people who make more than their share of mistake when typing domain names into their browsers, Adopting OpenDNS is just than first step in fully securing your DNS resource, if you’re interested in learing more about how to strengthen your defences.