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Information Systems and Innovation

The Senior Vice President Engineering and Chief Information Officer (CIO) is responsible for monitoring and maintenance of ICANN systems and technical operations, corporate security, and Information Technology, and the ICANN DNS Engineering Team (http://www.dns.icann.org/), which administers L-root and ICANN's DNS network services.

The Engineering and IT team is organized to optimize the management of a portfolio of responsibilities:

Engineering

The corporate Engineering team develops, deploys, manages and maintains a catalog of over 63 digital services, including solutions developed in-house and off-the shelf, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions. The catalog includes The Centralized Zone Data Service (CZDS), Root Zone Management (RZM), Naming Services portal, WIKI, and icann.org. These services are extended globally, many in multiple languages, to serve the needs of the ICANN community, the Board and ICANN staff.

Staff Operations

The Staff Operations team develops, deploys, manages and maintains 18 different internal services in support of the ICANN Organization.  These include solutions developed in-house and off-the shelf, and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solutions

Security

The corporate IT security team secures, monitors and manages data-assets, such as private data from the community of contracted parties, which are entrusted with ICANN for safe-keeping.

Infrastructure

The corporate IT infrastructure team serves the day-to-day needs of ICANN's globally-dispersed staff and, periodically, the high-intensity needs of ICANN's Board (during Board meetings) and community (during ICANN meetings). The ICANN Domain Name System (DNS) Engineering team (http://www.dns.icann.org) engineers, administers and manages ICANN's DNS network services and the global L-root constellation.

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Domain Name System
Internationalized Domain Name ,IDN,"IDNs are domain names that include characters used in the local representation of languages that are not written with the twenty-six letters of the basic Latin alphabet ""a-z"". An IDN can contain Latin letters with diacritical marks, as required by many European languages, or may consist of characters from non-Latin scripts such as Arabic or Chinese. Many languages also use other types of digits than the European ""0-9"". The basic Latin alphabet together with the European-Arabic digits are, for the purpose of domain names, termed ""ASCII characters"" (ASCII = American Standard Code for Information Interchange). These are also included in the broader range of ""Unicode characters"" that provides the basis for IDNs. The ""hostname rule"" requires that all domain names of the type under consideration here are stored in the DNS using only the ASCII characters listed above, with the one further addition of the hyphen ""-"". The Unicode form of an IDN therefore requires special encoding before it is entered into the DNS. The following terminology is used when distinguishing between these forms: A domain name consists of a series of ""labels"" (separated by ""dots""). The ASCII form of an IDN label is termed an ""A-label"". All operations defined in the DNS protocol use A-labels exclusively. The Unicode form, which a user expects to be displayed, is termed a ""U-label"". The difference may be illustrated with the Hindi word for ""test"" — परीका — appearing here as a U-label would (in the Devanagari script). A special form of ""ASCII compatible encoding"" (abbreviated ACE) is applied to this to produce the corresponding A-label: xn--11b5bs1di. A domain name that only includes ASCII letters, digits, and hyphens is termed an ""LDH label"". Although the definitions of A-labels and LDH-labels overlap, a name consisting exclusively of LDH labels, such as""icann.org"" is not an IDN."