Digital Transformation Consulting

In response to a significant rise in cyber-attacks in the UK, the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) faced the challenge of enhancing its Protective Domain Name Service (PDNS) to better protect public sector organizations from increasingly sophisticated threats. In 2024, incidents of cyber breaches had tripled compared to the previous year, affecting half of UK businesses and a third of charities. The existing PDNS was effective but needed to be more scalable and agile to address the growing threat landscape, particularly against low to medium severity attacks that could disrupt operations and drain resources.

To tackle these issues, the NCSC partnered with Accenture and Cloudflare to design and implement an upgraded PDNS platform. This new system was built to provide robust threat detection and protection, leveraging advanced AI for real-time analysis of DNS queries. The collaboration successfully transitioned over 8 million public sector users to the new platform without any disruption to critical operations. The implementation involved extensive communication with more than 1,000 organizations to prepare them for the transition, ensuring readiness to manage any temporary disruptions.

The results of this initiative were significant. In the first month after the go-live, the new PDNS system analyzed 100 billion queries and blocked 350 million cyber threats. Over the first six months, it successfully blocked 2 billion threats. Additionally, the system is projected to prevent average annual losses of at least £59 million, demonstrating its effectiveness in safeguarding public sector organizations. The PDNS is designed to be endlessly scalable, allowing for rapid onboarding of new organizations while maintaining high levels of protection. This positions the NCSC to manage trillions of queries annually, contributing to a safer and more resilient digital future for the UK.