This is the third post in our ongoing blog designed to keep you informed about the technical upgrade portion of the .au Registry Transformation Project.

This post focusses on the work underway to provide a significantly faster and more secure infrastructure for .au names.

Since the announcement on December 18 regarding Afilias’ appointment as the new Registry Operator for .au, we’ve been busy bringing resources to Australia and building the foundation for a faster, more secure system to support the .au domain.

For example, we are working with auDA to identify secure data centers in geographically dispersed areas to ensure that a natural disaster at a primary site doesn’t affect operations at all—with Afilias’ speedy failover processes, our secondary site will keep .au names up and running, regardless of the weather.

Afilias is also setting up new servers all over Australia to make sure Aussies get the fastest possible response and load times for .au sites and email.  The Afilias plan includes locations that may have never had their own local .au “nameservers”—places like Hobart, Perth, Darwin, Brisbane and Adelaide. This means speedier service because queries have fewer “hops” needed to get the response back to your browser.

We’ve also begun coordinating with Australian cyber security authorities to exchange information about the specific threats in Australia, potential threats from outside Australia, and the Government’s programs for protecting the internet.  We believe that coordinating these with Afilias’ cyber security experience and our advanced technical knowledge will result in a much stronger defense against all threats foreign and domestic.

All in, our preparations are proceeding on schedule and we expect a stable and secure transition at the end of June with no interruption of service to Australian end users.

More information on Afilias plc is located at www.afilias.info.  And we’ll soon expand this blog site to include everything about Afilias Australia Pty Ltd!

Have a question or want to suggest a topic for us to cover?  Please email us at transformationblog@afilias.com.au.