ICANN Blogs

Read ICANN Blogs to stay informed of the latest policymaking activities, regional events, and more.

RZM is One Year Old!

3 August 2012
By Nadia Sokolova

A little over a year ago, on 21 July 2011, ICANN, Verisign and NTIA launched a Root Zone Management (RZM) workflow automation system. This system gives top-level domain (TLD) operators greater flexibility when updating their TLD delegations: they can log in to the system using a web browser and lodge change requests. Moreover, the system provides greater transparency to the overall root management process, as it displays current status of the pending requests.

RZM implementation was a result of several years of collaborative work between ICANN, NTIA, and Verisign on automating certain aspects of the DNS root zone management. This was intended to improve efficiency in processing change requests. For the change requests that involve technical changes, like name servers and/or Delegation Signer (DS) records, the system performs technical checks instantaneously and alerts TLD managers to any issues in a matter of minutes. Most importantly, TLD managers can lodge a change request and complete several steps of the process on their own, at any time of the day and night, regardless of what part of the world they reside in, prior to ICANN’s IANA department staff reviewing the requested changes for the first time.

Another benefit of RZM is the added assurance that the system minimizes the possibility of introducing a human error into the process. This is possible because the data is never manually edited and is transmitted for final authorization and implementation via Extensible Provisioning Protocol (EPP). The data, as TLD managers originally submitted it, is maintained within RZM without any human intervention.

While the system has automated many steps in the root zone management change request process, ICANN’s IANA department staff monitors the system and is always available to reply to any inquiries and provide assistance along the way.

If you are a TLD manager, and you have not logged in to the automated system yet, give it a try! To obtain your credentials or to receive instructions on how to access RZM, please contact us at root-mgmt@iana.org.

Authors

Nadia Sokolova