Cloudflare has won a contract from the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to deliver registry and authoritative domain name system support to the .gov top level domain.
Under the $7.2 million award, Cloudflare is expected to provide managed name servers for the .gov zone as well as authoritative DNS hosting for .gov domain names, the San Francisco, California-based company announced on Friday.
“The Internet has made the United States government more accessible for constituents than ever before, whether they’re applying for a passport, learning health and safety recommendations for their communities or reaching out to a representative,” said Cloudflare Co-Founder and CEO Matthew Prince.
“Having a reliable and secure DNS for government agencies is critical to instill trust in all .gov activity, and working with us to achieve this is a testament to the reliability and security of the Cloudflare network,” he added.
Cloudflare’s responsibilities under the award align with CISA’s aims to minimize the attack surface of .gov-related infrastructure and federal agencies, automate sensitive areas of DNS security management, set DNS records that increase the difficulty of impersonating the government in email by default and improve visibility to enhance the detection and prevention of select DNS ecosystem problems rather than reacting to them.
DNS is seen as a crucial Internet service that is fundamental to the security of applications that sit on top of it and instrumental in driving traffic to .gov domain websites.
CISA selected Cloudflare to provide widely available DNS services necessary for boosting resilience and simplifying security operations for .gov domain users. These services are expected to streamline CISA’s process of delivering .gov domains to federal organizations at no cost.
The security organization first adopted Cloudflare in 2021 to supply a protective DNS resolver product for all federal civilian executive branch agencies.
In December of last year, Cloudflare attained FedRAMP moderate authorization. The software is currently available on the FedRAMP marketplace and is being utilized by more than 40 federal agencies.