The AARNet 2020 Annual Report is now online. Inside you’ll find an overview of who we are and what we do, along with information about our operational and engagement achievements and activities during 2020.

The research and education sector faced many challenges in 2020, from bushfires threatening campuses early in the year to the COVID-19 pandemic massively impacting our shareholders, and all our colleagues, stakeholders and economies across the globe. AARNet’s operational activities during 2020 were aligned to supporting our shareholders and customers during this time of change and included the provision of telecommunications and connectivity services, as well as cyber security, data and collaboration services.

Read about activities such as how we supported the rapid transition to working and learning from home by provisioning significant additional capacity in our Zoom platform to manage increased usage. As part of our ongoing work to build out services to help safeguard the sector from cyber attacks we launched our security operations centre. A significant milestone was reached in late 2020 when we lit the AARNet spectrum on the Japan-Guam-Australia-South subsea cable system (JGA-South) went live. JGA complements our investment in the Indigo subsea cable system, connecting Australia and Singapore, providing AARNet with the control to scale international capacity to meet the future demands of the sector. We also progressed the development of an AARNet Sensitive Data service to the proof-of-concept phase during 2020. This service builds on our CloudStor data collaboration platform to provide a controlled and auditable environment for working with sensitive data.

We also highlight a few projects and success stories in the research and education community that are enabled by our powerful network and collaboration services. Read about work underway for preserving our digital heritage; why we’re investing in cyber threat intelligence sharing; how data is being shared globally in the fight against COVID-19 and how a leading Australian regional school boosted network capacity and cyber security protection.

Throughout the year we collaborated with our shareholders and customers to ensure we continue to provide services and solutions that meet the unique needs of Australia’s research and education community. This is at the heart of everything we do.