In today's digital world, government agencies are increasingly being targeted by cyberattacks. To defend itself more effectively against this, the Chancellery of the Prime Minister called upon Belnet's expertise to implement DNS Anycast Premium. David Van Dromme, Service Manager ICT Infrastructure, and Jan Kerstens, Enterprise Architect, share their experiences while implementing this solution and discuss the benefits of DNS Anycast Premium.
- Can you first of all explain why the Chancellery chose DNS Anycast Premium?
“Several years ago, we were facing a sharp increase in DDoS attacks, specifically targeting our DNS infrastructure. Though we were already using Belnet Advanced DDoS Security – a service in which we were one of the pioneers – to mitigate those attacks, the filtering was sometimes not fine enough.
This greatly impacted the accessibility and availability of our websites and those of our customers. The Chancellery is an officially recognised DNS.BE and .EU registrar for the Federal Government and hosts thousands of domain names of other Federal Institutions, including those of Belgium's embassies worldwide. Given that the Belgian presidency of the EU was about to begin in 2024, we could not afford to suffer any impacts of that type or the potential reputational damage that would ensue.
That was what led us to look for a better solution. The technical experts at Belnet were extremely helpful to us in our search. In the end, we selected the Premium version of DNS Anycast, a service for which Belnet is partnering with Netnod.
DNS Anycast Premium ensures that our DNS information is copied to around 80 DNS servers worldwide. This ensures that our users receive the correct IP address of the sites they want to visit more quickly than before. DNS Anycast Premium also protects the domain names that are actually hosted by us, but for which we do not manage the websites themselves.”
- You also implemented a CDN solution at the same time. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
“In addition to DNS Anycast Premium, we also chose a CDN (Content Delivery Network) solution from Akamai for our web servers. A Content Delivery Network is a global network of servers that maintains copies of our websites. Users receive the content of a website via the server located closest to them, which means that the websites now load faster.
The combination of the DNS Anycast Premium solution and the CDN not only enhances the performance of our websites, but also reduces the impact of attacks on web applications, thereby enabling us to distribute our content more rapidly and more securely.
Internally, we are still operating with our own DNS infrastructure, but synchronisation with Netnod and this solution from Akamai takes place seamlessly. We can also fully control both the DNS Anycast Premium service and the CDN solution using our existing tools.”
“Combining a CDN with DNS Anycast Premium provides a dual layer of security and availability.”
- What benefits have you experienced since implementing DNS Anycast Premium?
“The most significant benefit of all is a reduction of the impact of DDoS attacks. Whereas in the past, federal government agencies were regularly affected by DNS problems, that has all but disappeared since introducing DNS Anycast Premium. There are still attacks, of course, but they no longer have any appreciable impact.
Even if DDoS attacks or routing issues occur on a regional basis, it is still possible to continue publishing our records in another location because they are replicated to DNS servers distributed globally. This significantly increases the availability of our services.
An added benefit is that since then, we have spent much less time managing DDoS-related problems. This significantly reduces the workload of our team and frees up enough capacity to deploy our IT and security resources to carry out other important tasks.
”Finally, we are also very satisfied with the value for money of the DNS Anycast Premium service."
- How did the implementation of the DNS Anycast Premium service and the cooperation with Belnet go?
- “Belnet provided us with excellent advice and support that enabled us to achieve the right solution to the issues we were facing. The implementation itself also went very smoothly, thanks in part to the technical expertise of Belnet's staff.
“Belnet helped us search for the right solution, which we were able to implement in a short time and are very satisfied with.”
We are therefore very pleased that we were able to implement this solution together with Belnet within a relatively short time.”