2020: A Record Year for MANRS

Over the past year, COVID-19 underlined the importance of a secure and resilient Internet to ensure we stay connected online. For MANRS, this meant even more incentive to work with network operators, Internet exchange points (IXPs), and content delivery network (CDN) and cloud providers to ensure data went where it was supposed to go via secure paths.

It was, therefore, really encouraging to see a record number of participants joining MANRS last year: the number of participants almost doubled from 317 participants at the beginning of the year to 588 participants as of December 31, 2020. MANRS participants now manage 651 autonomous systems from over 60 countries across all continents.

MANRS contributed to the decline in reported routing incidents from more than 5,000 in 2017 to below 4,000 in 2020, making the entire Internet more secure for everyone. While we cannot claim full credit, we can attribute the fewer routing incidents to the increasing number of network operators implementing best routing practices.

The year also saw us launching a new programme for CDN and cloud providers in collaboration with eight founding participants: Akamai, Amazon Web Services, Azion, Cloudflare, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Netflix. By the end of the year, that programme was up to 16 participants.

These are some of the success stories we highlight in the new MANRS Community Report 2020. In it, we detail the concrete impacts we made, from our efforts in training and partnership to leadership initiatives.

In the report, we also outline our goals and plan for 2021 and beyond, including the Ambassador and Fellowship Programs and a new programme for equipment vendors.

While we are delighted to see the progress the community made, it is also important to acknowledge the challenges we faced and lessons learned.

The pandemic forced almost all of us to stay at home, leading to many events being cancelled, especially during the first half of the year. We quickly pivoted our plans for outreach and community engagement, among others.

For instance, we converted the MANRS training materials that are normally used for face-to-face courses into an engaging and interactive online course. We worked closely with our partners to run online instructor-led workshops that combined self-paced learning with the online MANRS lab.

The MANRS team was on a steep learning curve last year, but we are very encouraged by the growing sense of shared responsibility among network operators. Last year proved that when the community comes together to create a baseline for routing security, we can protect the core of the Internet.

MANRS aims to become a self-governed community of network operators, IXPs, CDNs, cloud providers, and partner organizations that drives global adoption of MANRS actions and improvements in routing security.

To achieve that, MANRS will need all of your support to continue to grow and strengthen the community.

Read our report and join us for an even better 2021!