Singapore passes Bill to tighten security, sustainability rules for major data centres

Singapore's Infocomm Media Development Authority is tightening regulations for major data centre services and cloud providers. Voluntary standards will be replaced by mandatory baseline requirements. The goal is to prevent disruptions such as the 2023 outage that affected banking, payment and ATM services for more than 12 hours. About two-thirds of data centres in Singapore cross the 10-megawatt threshold for the new security and resilience requirements. In parliament on Oct 7, MPs questioned whether individual recovery plans would be enough when different services can depend on the same infrastructure. Nadirah Zaidi reports.