CIRA Today
Fiscal year 2020 marked the end of a strategic planning cycle for CIRA and the completion of the new five-year strategic plan. This plan set out to build on the core mission of delivering .CA to Canadians while transforming CIRA into a multi-service, multi-product organization. Core to these objectives were three strategic pillars: Innovate, Operate, and Donate. CIRA exceeded its objectives on all three fronts.
From an innovation perspective, CIRA succeeded in diversifying its services and revenue streams outside of .CA, building on CIRA’s unique infrastructure and cybersecurity strengths, including the launch of CIRA DNS Firewall in 2018, and Canadian Shield in 2020. The organization has also significantly upgraded and strengthened mission-critical underlying Domain Name Service (DNS) infrastructure, including the addition of many Anycast DNS nodes in locations around the world.
CIRA has also succeeded in its efforts to expand the reach of its services nationally and internationally by attracting new customers to its cybersecurity, DNS, and registry services. By the end of the 2020 fiscal year, CIRA’s customer base had expanded well beyond .CA channel partners and now includes domestic governments, domestic and international enterprise clients, and technology services partners.
CIRA Anycast DNS has signed more than 100 new organizations and global top-level domains (TLDs) to help keep their domains safe, stable, and secure. DNS Firewall is protecting more than 200 enterprise customers from malware, phishing, ransomware, and other cyberattacks, totalling 1.7 million individual users across Canada. Finally, the CIRA Registry Platform now provides registry management services such as Ireland’s .IE top-level domain and others.
From an operating standpoint, CIRA has made service excellence and safe, stable, and secure operations its highest priority. Innovation and investment in registry infrastructure have not only enabled the productizing registry services, but have enabled an unprecedented run on .CA domain names, due in part to the pandemic, but also to CIRA’s highly effective .CA “Domain Squad” marketing campaigns.
The final pillar of CIRA’s outgoing strategy was Donate, which focused on community investment efforts, and commitment to give back a portion of the proceeds of every .CA domain through grants to internet-related projects that benefit Canadians. There will continue to be four key funding priorities in this vein: community leadership, cybersecurity, digital literacy, and infrastructure.
From an international perspective, CIRA is very active, respected, and well-positioned. CIRA staff have played key leadership roles with ICANN, the Internet and Jurisdiction Forum, and the Internet Engineering Task Force. CIRA’s credibility abroad will be further enhanced by its recent ISO 27001 certification. Domestically, CIRA is a key player in the Canadian Internet Governance Forum, a vital partner to the Canadian Center for Cyber Security and collaborates with Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada on issues related to global Internet Governance.
The Future
Like all businesses, the road ahead for CIRA has both challenges and opportunities. Cybersecurity risks have skyrocketed, putting individuals, businesses, and organizations of all sizes at risk. While there has been an unprecedented demand for .CA domain names, there the ccTLD component of CIRA’s revenue will flatten over time.
The heart of CIRA’s new five-year strategic plan is to diversify the business and its revenue stream, grow new business lines and continue to pursue innovations that address customers’ pain and aspirations. The new strategy recognizes that while the domain industry is maturing, cybersecurity threats are growing, CIRA is in a strong position to leverage its world-class DNS infrastructure and expertise. Consequently, CIRA is making material changes to its organizational structured to capitalize on its opportunities, shifting from a traditional functional model to a more impactful business unit approach that imparts profit and loss responsibly on each business line.
