The British government announced Thursday it will now classify UK data centers as "critical national infrastructure," to guarantee increased cybersecurity protections.
The new label will give data center servers and infrastructure systems – responsible for supporting the country's communications – an extra layer of protection from cyberattacks.
Britain said the move would reassure companies building data centers, such as DC01UK, which it said had submitted proposals for a 3.75 billion pound ($4.88 billion) investment in Europe's largest data center in Hertfordshire.
"Bringing data centers into the Critical National Infrastructure regime will allow better coordination and cooperation with the government against cyber criminals and unexpected events," UK technology minister Peter Kyle said.
Cyber threats are growing — from hostile states to criminals using AI to exploit vulnerabilities.
undefined Peter Kyle (@peterkyle) September 12, 2024
We're bringing in new laws to strengthen our cyber defences and today, we've introduced better protections for UK data centres. https://t.co/UddaZ39SeI
The government said the new designation would put data centers on an equal footing with water and energy, and allow it to minimize damage to the economy in the event of critical incidents.
On Wednesday, Amazon's cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, said it would spend 8 billion pounds (10.5 billion USD) in Britain over the next five years to build and operate data centers.
Several recent incidents have highlighted how vulnerable services are to IT blackouts. In July, for instance, the Crowd Strike outage disrupted appointments at health services across the country.
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