Press Releases

ORION Offers Complimentary Cloud Service from CIRA Anycast DNS

(Toronto) – ORION is pleased to partner with the Canadian Internet Registry Authority (CIRA) to provide its CIRA Anycast DNS to ORION’s connected institutions. This will provide improved external DNS resolution, up-time, and added DDoS protection for DNS for the research, education and innovation institutions connected to ORION’s world-class fibre-optic network.

Available free of charge, the CIRA Anycast DNS cloud from CIRA gives DNS servers situated within ORION’s connected institutions enhanced protection against DDoS attacks, allowing these critical organizations to continue operations. As ORION continually strives to improve its service offerings, this partnership with CIRA demonstrates another way that ORION helps users take advantage of cutting-edge digital tools to support research, education and innovation in Ontario.

“ORION is pleased to be working with CIRA to offer this critical service to our connected institutions. In an age of sophisticated technology advancement, attacks on an organization’s security infrastructure can come from multiple devices and applications,” says Brad Gray, Director of Business Development and Strategic Alliances. “An institution leveraging CIRA’s cloud-based Anycast DNS service would diffuse the impact of a DNS DDoS attack, allowing educators, students and researchers to continue to focus on the important work of innovation. Strengthening the Nebula suite of cloud services by providing this amenity free of charge to our users is one of the ways we’d like to show our commitment to our community.”

“Designed specifically to serve institutions and companies in Canada, CIRA’s Canadian-based DNS infrastructure is perfectly suited for Canadian companies serving Canadian customers,” said Dave Chiswell, Vice President of Product Development at CIRA. “As online services become more pervasive and critical, I applaud ORION for ensuring that Ontario’s colleges, universities and research centres are equipped with the wold-class web infrastructure that their users demand.”

Quick facts

  • CIRA’s Anytime DNS solution protects ORION connected institutions from both DDoS attacks against DNS servers, and failure from unicast DNS servers.
  • As a result, critical services, including website, email and web applications or services that require domain name resolution, will remain online.
  • DNS resolution is handled by DNS clouds around the world while delivering benefits for Canadian traffic. The CIRA Anycast DNS cloud is more resilient to DDoS attacks than standard unicast DNS servers because it uses geo-location to specify query resolution by named servers.
  • With CIRA Anycast DNS, the DNS DDoS attack is isolated to the name server closest to the source(s) of attack (local node), protecting the rest of an organization’s Canadian traffic.
  • As a result of utilizing name-serving clouds, this solution dramatically improves response time, capacity, latency, security and up-time.
  • Outsourcing DDoS and DNS protection to a cloud-based provider allows for upstream resources to be protected from attacks, eliminating the associated bandwidth issues.
  • ORION’s nebula of cloud services are seamlessly accessed over the ORION network by our connected institutions, offering cost savings, and above all, world-class service.

To inquire about installing this service, connected institutions should contact communitydev@orion.on.ca.

About ORION:

As Ontario’s backbone of innovation, the Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network (ORION) is one of the largest Research, Education and Innovation (RE&I) networks in the world. We connect all of Ontario’s universities, most colleges, several teaching hospitals, public research facilities, and a growing number of Ontario’s school boards to one another and to a global network of RE&I connections. In addition to providing one of the world’s fastest broadband connections, we are a research and innovation partner for our members. Through our technology and support, ORION constantly strives to keep Ontario on the leading edge of innovation.