Canada’s domain name authority has added a new service to help organizations reduce the impact of malicious attacks to their DNS (domain name system) infrastructure.

The Canadian Internet Registration Authority (CIRA) has created what is calls the D-Zone Anycast DNS, a secondary DNS service featuring two anycast clouds comprised of 22 nodes installed in a global network of Internet exchange points. The high performance, fault tolerance and reliability of the architecture helps to keep websites and other cloud applications continuously available on the Internet, the company said.

“DNS is a mission critical service and the impact of a DNS outage can be devastating to an organization,” Dave Chiswell, CIRA’s vice president of product development, said in a release. “Our D-Zone solution will add an important option to IT managers’ toolkit, allowing them to leverage CIRA‘s DNS expertise to help protect their online operations.”

CIRA, which oversees the .ca domain, is adding services to convince Canadian-based organizations to list with it rather than pick one of the increasing number of domains available. D-Zone is a way .ca companies can help fend off attacks against a company’s DNS infrastructure, it says.

It’s a factor that Webnames.ca, a Canadian domain name registration and hosting company to select CIRA‘s D-Zone solution for its forthcoming Premium DNS services, slated for launch in Q1 2015, it said.

“DNS performance is critical to our business,” Cybele Negris, Webnames.ca co-founder and CEO said in a release. “We look forward to the reliability and performance of an anycast solution provided by CIRA, and feel there will be strong synergies given our mutual Canadian base of operations.”

CIRA said D-Zone Anycast has more nodes within Canada than any other anycast offering. Localizing DNS resolution to servers in Canadian IXPs also benefits companies by keeping Canadian traffic in Canada and reducing latency for DNS resolution to deliver web applications and services faster, it also said.