IE Domain Registry Annual Report 2019

IE Domain Registry  Annual Report & Review  2019 29 Business and Market Review Customer Experience The Technical Services team also focused on improving the customer experience (CX) of our Registrars and registrants. In consultation with our customers, a number of technical/ functional improvements were made to the Console interface of the Core Registry System (CRS). CX is a company priority and process improvements will continue on an ongoing basis. Planning for a new domain Registry management platform commenced during 2019. Following extensive research, a decision was made to license the Registry system used by a large ccTLD. This will provide an out-of-the-box, fully integrated Registry management system. It has EPP, a Console for Registrars, a Registry Console for IE Domain Registry staff, complete with an email communications package and a data export facility for invoicing. A separate software application will be licensed for ticket processing. This project is a significant financial and operational commitment by the Company to its customers and will ensure standardisation of processes and future-proofing of the core registry platform. The Data Analytics team focused on data visualisation reports for customers in 2020. These included monthly reports which gave our Registrars a more granular view of key metrics on their portfolios each month, including, analysis of detailing transfers in/ out, new business/lost business. These were well-received and will be further developed in 2020 to include more detail on the entire end-to-end domain life-cycle process for Registrars. In cooperation with colleagues from other ccTLDs, we worked to build a zone crawler. The purpose of the crawler is to provide data and insights on .ie domain activation and how the current .ie zone is being used. We can produce data on whether a domain has a website connected, if it has SSL setup correctly or if it is using email, amongst other data points. In 2020 this data will be used to provide insights for our Registrars to help ensure the stability and growth of the namespace. Collaboration Team members continued with collaboration efforts with various internet stakeholders through membership of organisations such as the DNS Operations, Analysis and Research Centre (DNS-OARC) group. This group brings together members from the major internet DNS operators, including ICANN and Verisign, as well as implementers and researchers in order to coordinate responses to attacks, share critical information and engage in discussion and analysis. Staff are also actively engaged with the Irish Reporting and Information Security Service (IRISS), the Irish Neutral Internet Exchange (INEX), RIPE, CENTR and others. The team actively participated in international industry events such as CENTR meetings (Technical, Security and R&D), RIPE and ICANN during the year. The .ie Domain Name System infrastructure The IE Domain Registry Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure consists of a network of nameserver locations around the globe, illustrated in Chart 1 on page 32. The lookup or resolution service for .ie domain queries is performed at all nameserver locations. A critical component of this nameserver infrastructure is the use of ‘Anycast’ load balancing technology provided to us by the secondary nameserver service providers. This ‘Anycast’ facility (illustrated in red/blue text, in Chart 1) protects against a Denial of Service attack (DDoS attack) by allowing the geographical distribution of .ie domain lookup requests to any available DNS resolver for redundancy. This effectively localises the potential adverse effects of the DDoS attack, by preventing it spreading across the entire network. For the .ie namespace, this means increased system efficiency, faster response times, reduced potential for outages, and increased resilience against deliberate or malicious attacks. It is important to note that even if our physical locations, staff and primary nameserver were wiped out (an unlikely scenario) and no action was taken to invoke emergency plans (an even more unlikely scenario), then service to .ie domains would continue for a minimum of 30 days without any intervention. Obviously, new registrations, changes and deletions would not take place but crucially, existing domain holders’ websites and email would continue to function normally during this time, using the secondary nameserver locations around the world. During 2019, Dyn was acquired by Oracle and announced that they were discontinuing their Anycast service. We have engaged with several providers to evaluate alternatives to Dyn in early 2020, well ahead of their expected cut-off.