Britain labels data centers critical infrastructure to boost cyber defenses

LONDON — The U.K. on Thursday said it now classes data centers as critical infrastructure, in a move that is expected to boost cybersecurity in the country and help operators of the critical computing facilities work with the government to protect data from malicious attacks and outages.

British Technology Minister Peter Kyle said that U.K. data centers will be given “Critical National Infrastructure,” or CNI, designation, a label normally reserved for only key sectors such as energy, nuclear power, defense, space, and emergency services.

“Data centres are the engines of modern life, they power the digital economy and keep our most personal information safe,” Kyle said in a statement Thursday.

Granting data centers critical infrastructure status will enable the government to coordinate better against hackers and unexpected cyber events, Kyle said.

Data center operators will effectively be given a direct line to the government to prepare for and respond to data threats, the government said.

It is the first time a new sector has been granted CNI designation in almost a decade. Space and defense were both given CNI status in 2015.

Meanwhile, the U.K. also announced Thursday that it is in favor of a plan submitted by a firm called DC01UK to develop a huge 85-acre data center in Hertfordshire, England, which it said would become the largest in Europe once built.

DC01UK plans to commit £3.75 billion ($4.9 billion) of funding toward the new data center project, which is expected to directly create more than 700 local jobs and support 13,740 data and tech jobs in the U.K., according to the government.

It comes after U.S. tech giant Amazon announced Wednesday that it would commit £8 billion ($10.45 billion) via its AWS cloud computing division into the U.K. over the next five years to build and operate data centers in the country.

Data centers are a key part of the modern internet as it exists today. They enable cloud computing, or the delivery of internet services to end-consumers via remote servers, on a mass scale.

When they go offline, it can cause massive outages for internet users, with sometimes critical services going down.

For example, a massive global IT outage struck earlier this year caused by a glitchy software update issued by U.S. cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The outage disrupted the majority of doctors’ practices in the U.K., according to the government.

The U.K. has bigger plans to boost cybersecurity in the country. Earlier this summer, it was announced as part of the King’s Speech that a new Cyber Security and Resilience Bill will be introduced to mandate that providers of essential IT infrastructure protect their supply chains from attacks.