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60 Seconds in the Life of CIRA
At CIRA, we provide a critical infrastructure for business and social interactions on the Internet in Canada — resolving 25,000,000 transactions per hour through our servers.
Every 60 seconds in Canada, a staggering volume of activities are transacted via the Internet. An email is read. A photo is sent. A file is downloaded. A Facebook page is updated. A bank transaction is completed. A web conference is convened. A Twitter message is tweeted. A telephone call is placed. A blog entry is posted. A medical chart is consulted. A hotel room is reserved. A book is bought. A house is sold. A flight is booked. A search is conducted. A video is viewed. Every 60 seconds in Canada, this unimaginable variety of transactions illustrates how the Internet has become a dominant feature in our business, personal and social lives.
A huge swath of the world’s economy is conducted online. People everywhere use it to gather information, to buy and sell things, and to communicate and collaborate with friends, colleagues and family around the corner and around the globe. We use it almost unconsciously to perform tasks both mundane and exotic. We are as yet not fully aware of how it is influencing human behaviour in ways that are both trivial and significant.
On the darker side of human conduct, the Internet has also become a new arena in which vandals and criminals commit everything from simple disruption to outright illicit activity such as fraud and identity theft.
The presence of the Internet is so ubiquitous we are often no longer even aware of how extensively we use it or how reliant we have become on being connected to it. Most of us now give no more thought to how it actually flows all around us than we do to the infrastructure behind the electrical power that likewise flows invisibly and effortlessly to us.
In Canada, a significant part of that operating system is maintained, safeguarded and promoted by us, the Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA).
We manage Canada’s dot-ca domain name registry, the technology that locates the computer a person is looking for whenever they type in a website or email address, such as www.cira.ca, that ends in dot-ca. This means that most requests for a dot-ca domain, including those of major Internet service providers such as Bell and Rogers, need our computers. CIRA makes dot-ca work.
It’s a mission-critical responsibility that lies at the core of our mandate and consumes the bulk of our attention and resources.
Much like the Internet itself, CIRA has grown and matured over the decade since we first came into existence. Much like the Internet itself, we wrestled with explosive growth. But while the Internet today might be characterized as a sometimes moody and unpredictable teenager, we, by contrast, are a fully mature and professional organization whose key responsibility is to ensure the reliability of the domain name system (DNS) and registry at the heart of the Internet in Canada.
The world’s telephone system operates with so-called “five-nines,” or 99.999%, availability, a standard that translates into about five minutes of allowable downtime in a full year. That might be good enough for the phone system but it’s not good enough for our infrastructure, which can’t be down for even one minute. Every 60 seconds on average, more than 400,000 DNS requests hit our servers to complete any of the unimaginable variety of transactions and collaborations Canadians make online every minute of every day. And every one of them demands that our servers be immediately available to properly route them on their way.
In the rest of this annual report, we’d like to show you some of what happens in a typical minute of Internet use in Canada. As we accelerate through a 60-second snapshot of what Canadians do online in a typical minute, we hope you come away with a better understanding of, and appreciation for, the crucial role we play in maintaining Canada’s domain on the Internet, the operating system for our lives.
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