the solution brief for Canadian Higher Education
Transcription
the solution brief for Canadian Higher Education
PROTECT YOUR BUSINESS INSTITUTION Using D-Zone Transaction Anycast DNS Signatures D-ZONE SOLUTION BRIEF: UNIVERSITY AND COLLEGE SITUATION A typical Canadian College or University website has traffic ranking in the Alexa top 1000 for Canada. Analysis of several large institutions DNS traffic has shown that they get around 50 per cent global and 50 per cent Canadian traffic – a surprising fact for many IT administrators. For an institution, web properties are critical for both its marketing and operations. They are used for recruiting, alumni relations, student and faculty communication and a host of online applications. Traffic to these sites is often campaign driven (such as recruitment or fundraising) and can spike for periods of days or weeks. Because these campaigns represent a significant commitment in time and resources from the administration, DNS outages can have a very high impact on the institution and on the credibility of the IT operations team. CHALLENGES A technical review of the public DNS shows that most institutions are running one or two unicast name servers on the same subnet in their own data centre. This has negative implications for performance and up-time. In addition, 71 per cent don’t appear to have a back-up provider. Website performance is impacted by having all DNS queries answered on campus, with the impact amplified for out of province and international visitors. The lack of diversity of name servers on the same subnet also increases the risk of DNS downtime because the servers share a common router port, switch, cabling and power source. Unicast servers on the same subnet also lack the resiliency required to withstand a DDoS attack that could bring down the servers and flood the Internet access. SOLUTION CIRA’s D-Zone Anycast DNS secondary service can be added to an existing infrastructure and be configured to answer all external DNS queries. With anycast, a globally distributed cloud of name servers share a single IP address. Layer 3 routing automatically routes queries to the closest name server, reducing latency and providing transparent fault tolerance. In addition, the massive distributed capacity and bandwidth of the D-Zone Anycast DNS service adds DDoS resiliency. Implementing D-Zone does not require any capital equipment or changes to the existing DNS administration process. The interface between an existing name server and D-Zone is a standard DNS zone transfer. For the IT team, the reporting features that D-Zone provides them with, gives information on the traffic patterns and health of the DNS that many don’t have. RESULTS Universities and Colleges get improved reliability and performance for their external DNS by allowing D-Zone to answer queries from their users on the Internet. A 100 per cent uptime SLA provides reliability while the latency of DNS queries has be shown to be improved by as much as 100 per cent (and more) for international queries. However, resilience and performance are only part of the results. Institutions also benefit from having 24x7 monitoring, 24x7 support and a new and advanced set of DNS metrics to help them to better manage this mission critical network service. LEARN MORE To get D-Zone Anycast DNS working for you, please visit www.cira.ca/d-zone or contact us today by email [email protected] or by phone 1-844-863-9663