91% of healthcare providers have DNS vulnerabilities – Peterborough County-City Health Unit is not one of the them

CIRA announced a deployment of our .CA D-Zone Anycast solution with the Peterborough County-City Health Unit. Learn about why a resilient DNS is critical for health care.

This week CIRA announced a deployment of our .CA D-Zone Anycast solution with the Peterborough County-City Health Unit. In a way, this deployment is something of a call to action for Canada’s healthcare community. As we turn to a new set of sensors, devices, probes and databases to manage modern healthcare environments and as the people providing front-line care or executive leadership in healthcare organizations become more connected, it is critical that healthcare CIOs keep pace.

“Digital services and electronic record keeping represent an important opportunity for Canada’s healthcare system. As more information and data is transferred and stored online, healthcare organizations need solutions with the security and reliability to keep their operations current”, said David Chiswell, VP of product development at CIRA.

We have evidence that when it comes to DNS infrastructure, healthcare organizations in Canada have room to improve. CIRA’s DNS experts evaluated 300 hospitals and healthcare institutions and found that 91% of those studied are not taking the necessary steps to protect their DNS from outages caused by either a network failure or DNS DDoS attacks.

A resilient DNS infrastructure is an important piece of IT defense and risk mitigation, but traditionally it has not been a priority for IT pros. Whether the authoritative DNS is targeted directly in a DDoS attack or, more commonly, DNS network resources are overwhelmed in an attack against the application layer, the end result is the same: nothing works. CIO’s of Canada’s healthcare organizations can’t ignore the risk to their DNS.

With the largest Canadian footprint of any global DNS provider, our .CA D-Zone Anycast solution is a strong fit for institutions serving Canadian Internet users. Improved performance for Canadian users and improved protection from global attacks can help protect patient data and keep operations running smoothly.

With that in mind, is your organziation’s DNS where it needs to be? Take Peterborough’s lead, it might save you headaches down the line. Head here for a free trial of D-Zone Anycast DNS or simply contact us and learn more about D-Zone for healthcare.

About the author
Ryan Hill

Ryan Saxby Hill is an expert in communications and digital marketing. He is served as the communications manager at CIRA from 2014-2017. Previously, Ryan led media relations and online engagement efforts at the Canada Foundation for Innovation and has held positions handling global communications and PR programs for Ciena Corporation and Nortel Networks.

Ryan is a founder of Apartment613, an award winning Ottawa-based digital community media organization and serves on the board of directors for the Centretown Citizens Ottawa Corporation, one of Canada’s most innovative non-profit housing providers.