Hamilton adopts new made-in-Canada DNS; leads Canadian cities in IT resiliency

.CA D-Zone Anycast DNS offers municipal leaders options for DDoS protection  

HAMILTON, Aug. 11, 2015 /CNW Telbec/ - The City of Hamilton has adopted .CA D-Zone Anycast DNS from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) as part of its plan to create a robust and reliable IT network. One of Canada's 20 largest cities, Hamilton's IT department provides services such as parks and recreation registration, parking ticket payments and taxation inquiries for more than half a million citizens directly from www.hamilton.ca.

In an effort to ensure consistent availability of key city services, Hamilton's IT department needed a secondary DNS for its highest traffic sites, including city, tourism and police websites.

Key Facts

• Implementation of .CA D-Zone Anycast DNS secondary service to answer all external DNS queries is part of a solid IT risk management plan and a commitment by the city to offer the best online service to its citizens.
• Analysis of Hamilton's existing DNS showed that an attack on the City's existing name servers had the potential to bring down the main tools for communication – primarily email and the web interface.
• D-Zone offers a globally distributed cloud of name servers which share a single IP address. Layer three routing automatically routes queries to the closest name server. The massive distributed capacity and bandwidth of the D-Zone Anycast DNS service adds DDoS resiliency.
• The implementation of D-Zone has been cost-effective. It did not require any capital equipment or change to Hamilton's DNS administration process. The interface between the municipality's existing name servers and D-Zone is a secure DNS zone transfer via TSIG. For the IT team, the reporting features of D-Zone provide information on the traffic patterns and health of the DNS.

Executive quotes

"By allowing D-Zone to answer queries from their users on the Internet, the City of Hamilton has improved the reliability and performance of their external DNS. Further, having 24/7 monitoring and support and a new advanced set of DNS metrics helps them to better manage this mission critical network service."
- Dave Chiswell, vice president of product development at CIRA

 "As part of our own enterprise risk management, we have taken note of DDoS attacks on government sites. We wanted to make sure the City's information is better protected and that Hamiltonians can access online services with reliability and speed. That there was no capital investment required and a lot of support up front and ongoing from the Canadian Internet Registration Authority makes D-Zone Anycast an excellent choice for the City of Hamilton."
- Peter MacNeil, chief security & technology architect for the City of Hamilton

Additional resources

Case study: D-Zone Anycast DNS at a municipality

Solution brief: D-Zone for municipalities

About The City of Hamilton

Hamilton, ON is home to 520,000 Canadians. Once reputed as Canada's steel manufacturing centre, Hamilton has expanded from its industrial base to become a hub of international business and globally-renowned leader in medical and health sciences. The municipality has invested significantly in local tourism and conservation to take advantage of its position as "The City of Waterfalls." Its IT network thus serves a diverse range of stakeholders.

About CIRA and .CA

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority manages the .CA top-level domain on behalf of all Canadians. A member-driven organization, CIRA represents Canada's Internet internationally, develops and implements policies that support Canada's Internet and continues to develop new products to support a robust, secure and reliable DNS.

SOURCE Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA)

or interview requests: Ryan Saxby Hill, Communications manager, CIRA, [email protected], 613-316-2397