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.
