ICANN-MANAGED ROOT SERVER (IMRS) CLUSTERS
Initiative: Installing two IMRS clusters in Africa — one in Kenya; the other location to be announced.
Goals Of The Initiative
Add crucial capacity to support the anticipated growth in Internet use across Africa.
Diminish the risk of Internet service disruptions and degradation due to cyberattacks.
Buttress and enhance the overall resilience of the DNS infrastructure in Africa.
What Will This Initiative Achieve?
An IMRS cluster is an installation of multiple servers that have a large service or processing capacity, which ensures that Internet queries can be answered within the region, rather than depending on networks and servers in other parts of the world. This also reduces root zone DNS query latency and contributes to improving the experience of Internet users across the entire area.
IMRS clusters reduce the impact of potential cyberattacks on the root zone service in Africa. Distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, the most common type of cyberattack, work by overwhelming servers with a flood of queries or Internet traffic. Implementing IMRS clusters provides higher bandwidth and data processing capacity to alleviate some of this traffic. Additionally, the clusters corroborate the Internet infrastructure for the entire region in the event of connectivity issues (for example, if an underground cable is cut).
One IMRS cluster was deployed in late 2022; another is slated for the second half of 2023.