Since those first days, GCA has swelled its ranks to include a full executive team, regional directorates, a development team, a marketing and communications team, and a business team. The organisation is comprised of a diverse group of people located across North America and Europe with varied backgrounds –  and all with a drive to make the world a better place.

GCA has a big vision: a secure and trustworthy Internet. An Internet that is reliable and that enables social and economic progress for everyone – no matter who or where they are. The mission is to reduce cyber risk and improve our connected world, and now, every day there are programmes and projects being introduced that are making a difference.

Community and collaboration

GCA has built an impressive global community of partners committed to the mission and engaged in helping achieve it through direct engagement in projects, as an amplifying voice, as champions of the cause, and through financial contributions. The organisation gives an open invitation to anyone who would like to join in their efforts.

Protective DNS service

Quad9 is a prime example of big thinking and collaboration. GCA built and launched (in November 2017) this protective DNS service in collaboration with IBM and Packet Clearing House. Now its own nonprofit organisation, Quad9 is a free, privacy preserving, global service that blocks access to malicious sites, significantly limiting/reducing the impact of phishing and malicious software. Since its initial launch, Quad9 has grown to include a presence on six continents, in 90 countries, and in 150 cities blocking access to malicious sites an average of 60 million times each day.

GCA has calculated that global use of Quad9 or other protective DNS services could save approximately $150-200 billion per year.

Looking towards the future, the GCA continues to work on projects that have global reach and impact. Among them are IoT security – GCA continues its work on the Automated IoT Defence Ecosystem (AIDE). They are also investigating routing security and how to improve trustworthiness in the domain name system (DNS). And they continue their quest with metrics – both how to evaluate the impact of the projects they take on and how to measure cybersecurity health so that as a community they can make better, more informed decisions about what will reduce cyber risk.