Strengthening Canada’s digital resilience
in FY27
A good plan must have the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. As we enter year two of our current strategic plan, we’re navigating significant geopolitical and economic shifts. The global trade environment is changing rapidly, and Canada’s relationships with longstanding partners are being tested in ways that may have implications for how the internet is governed and operated.
Well-established norms around international cooperation are being re-examined, and some of the frameworks that have supported the open internet can’t be taken for granted. While there’s no need for alarm, CIRA must be prepared to adapt quickly to changes in global trade and security.
Geopolitical uncertainty
Longstanding alliances, treaties and partnerships that have underpinned international cooperation are no longer assured. This has implications for internet governance, cross-border data flows and CIRA’s relationships with international partners. At the same time, growing interest in Canadian technology sovereignty presents an opportunity to advance practical measures—such as keeping more Canadian data and internet traffic within domestic infrastructure—while maintaining our commitment to a global, interoperable internet. CIRA will continue to participate in internet policy discussions domestically and internationally as an active voice regarding Canadian digital sovereignty.
The buy Canadian movement
Increased demand for Canadian products and services is creating favourable conditions for .CA domains and CIRA’s cybersecurity offerings. In FY27, we’ll work to expand .CA domain availability and build greater awareness of its value among Canadian businesses. We’ll also position our cybersecurity products as trusted, Canadian-built alternatives in an increasingly uncertain technology landscape.
A significant rise in AI-enhanced cyber attacks that operate at a scale has made distinguishing machine from human nearly impossible. In FY27, we’ll assess how to defend against these threats, how to integrate AI into our own defences and how shifts in AI adoption may affect demand for domain names. Whether AI makes domains less valuable or drives new demand for online real estate as creation tools become more accessible is an open question—one we intend to answer by ensuring .CA is positioned to capture whatever opportunity emerges.
Demand for components—particularly RAM—is being driven up by the rapid build-out of AI data centres. This is affecting pricing across the technology supply chain, including the hardware that supports our DNS network. Combined with geopolitical instability, these cost pressures could have an outsized impact on operations and will require careful management throughout the year.
Cybersecurity
Cyber threats continue to grow in scope and impact, affecting individuals, small businesses, schools, hospitals and other institutions that often lack the resources to respond. CIRA Canadian Shield provides free DNS-level protection for individual Canadians, and in FY27 we’ll pursue new partnerships and develop features aimed at reaching two million users in the family and protected tiers. For organizations, we’ll build on CIRA XDR with managed services providing resource-constrained institutions with 24/7 threat protection and response.
Hello Registry
FY27 will see CIRA reach the next phase of our partnership with SIDN as we onboard .NL, while also navigating the new ICANN gTLD program. These significant operational milestones will test our capacity and our ability to scale.
Closing the digital gap
Many Canadians still lack reliable, high-quality internet access. CIRA advocates for policy change, but we also act directly through Net Good by CIRA, funding projects like National Capital FreeNet’s CommuniFi initiative. In FY27, Net Good will continue to be a priority with the latest round of our grants program.
Our culture
As always, CIRA will continue investing in its people. We do our best work as a team, and we’ll ensure the resources and supports are in place for our people to execute effectively during a demanding year.
The year ahead
FY27 will test CIRA’s agility as the global environment shifts, but it also creates opportunities for us to help strengthen Canada’s digital resilience. We’ll expand on .CA and our Canadian-made cybersecurity offerings, execute operational milestones, advance Net Good and ensure our teams have the resources required to deliver at pace.
Strategic priorities in FY27
FY27 marks the midpoint of our FY26-28 Strategic Plan—a year for iteration, maturation and growth. As always, the fundamental priority for CIRA is the safe, stable and secure operation of the .CA domain name system, and we’ll continue to invest both time and resources to ensure the safety and efficient operation of our founding mission.
As the world continues to face monumental changes on what seems like a daily basis, our guiding principle remains ensuring our core technology, infrastructure, data and platforms are safe, stable and secure. This necessitates constantly maintaining contingency plans and redundancies for things that may have seemed unthinkable only a few short years ago.
Acceleration of .CA growth
The trend we saw coming last year has fully materialized, with the buy Canadian movement having a noticeable impact on .CA registrations. The geopolitical tensions affecting Canada are driving consumers to seek out Canadian goods, businesses and e-commerce platforms, leading to an increase in businesses of all sizes choosing .CA.
- Keep riding the wave of pro-Canadian sentiment by rolling out new campaigns and targeting new audiences, including new Canadians.
- Continue to diversify our channel—.CA being available in more places means we are better able to capture demand when it increases.
- Carry over momentum in onboarding new registrars as direct selling continues to grow.
- Continue to highlight small businesses in Canada, leveraging our .CA Small business gift guide.
Increase diversity of revenues
Investments made in year one of the FY26-28 Strategic Plan will be a significant focus of year two as we grow and mature new products and services like CIRA XDR to generate more revenue to fuel our mission. Our partnership with SIDN, known in the industry as Hello Registry, will experience a big milestone this year with the completion of the .NL migration onto the platform.
- Complement CIRA XDR with CIRA MDR, a 24/7 managed detection and response service, to provide a more complete solution for customers and increase our potential market.
- Provide secure, high-performing authoritative and recursive DNS to increase resilience for our customers. This includes extending Anycast DNS services and upgrading our data centres’ capacities for second Level and TLD DNS and defence against growing DDOS attacks.
- Continue the evolution of DNS Firewall and Canadian Shield with new client software to allow the services to be used anywhere a user connects.
- Execute on the blue-sky phase of the CIRA-SIDN partnership, combining our collective efforts and resources to accelerate revenue opportunities.
- Launch ICANN’s New gTLD Program: 2026 Round application process, which is expected to generate additional sales opportunities for our registry platform.
Increase talent density and organizational effectiveness
After increasing talent density within the organization and kicking off a new senior leadership initiative in year one of our strategic plan, we’ll continue making every effort in the year ahead to ensure CIRA remains a place where great people join to do their best work.
- Fully implement our new talent density philosophy into all talent management, ensuring every team member is a high performer with the skills, versatility and drive needed to thrive.
- Evolve the Leadership Team (LT) to increase its effectiveness with a focus on improving the flow of communications between them and the executive leadership team.
- Continue to reinforce our diversity and inclusion initiatives as CIRA fundamentally believes a diversity of perspectives leads to better problem solving and a better reflection of our customers.
Integrate and streamline our internal and external tech
As CIRA scales up, ensuring the organization has the right technology to support our growth will be critical.
- Optimize our technology, tools and platforms by retiring redundant systems and standardizing shared tools across the organization.
- Continue taking a practical approach on AI, expanding organizational access to the latest tools to identify which ones deliver real value.
- Explore the possibility of expanding our AI capabilities by integrating them into CIRA products and services.
- Optimize our virtualization environment by right-sizing workloads to address rising costs from vendors while maintaining the performance and reliability we need.
Expand the number of Canadians protected by cybersecurity suite
We’ll continue to strive towards our strategic plan goal of reaching two million users on the protected and family tiers of CIRA Canadian Shield after making key service upgrades last year to reduce reliance on third parties and improve resiliency. And we’ll continue to bolster the customer base for paid cybersecurity services within and beyond the MUSH (municipalities, universities, schools and hospitals) sector.
- Pursue more users, more partnerships and more integrations to drive the growth of Canadian Shield, evolving it into a complete suite of home protection for Canadians.
- Continue to build out our CIRA Hub platform, providing more ways for our cybersecurity customers to interact with our services and discover new ones.
- Adapt products to more easily onboard managed service providers and resellers, enabling us to broaden our reach into communities across Canada.
Influence internet governance policy
CIRA has championed digital sovereignty for many years and is one of the original sovereign technology companies in Canada. Coming off a major victory with the successful finalization of the WSIS+20 process, FY27 looks to be another year of significant change for internet governance with global geopolitical tensions having a profound impact on Canada’s internet.
- Continue to participate and advocate where we have expertise to help guide Canada’s digital sovereignty ambitions, including at the upcoming CUSMA review, where we’ll participate in the consultation process to ensure Canada’s digital sovereignty is strengthened.
- Tackle the issue of DNS abuse, bringing our perspective on DNS resilience to the international stage.
- Elevate the awareness of Net Good in our community, helping drive more engagement, more partnerships and more good towards Canada’s internet.
