Cyber security experts, the UK Government wants your views on the current landscape of data storage and infrastructure

It is predicted that at least 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is produced every day (that's 2.5 followed by a staggering 18 zeros). With an increase in data comes an increase in risk and threats to access this data. A lot of this data includes highly sensitive information from personal details, involving bank details, health records, national insurance numbers, home addresses, and many more details that could put you at risk if it falls into the wrong hands.

The UK government relies on large-scale data storage and processing for essential services including healthcare and banking to help with the functioning of the economy. This means it is up to the government to ensure there is a high-quality risk management framework to protect the data infrastructure.

On the 26^th May 2022, The Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) released a policy paper, conducting a call for views. It welcomes any person or organisation to share their views on the UK data storage and processing infrastructure, as well as sharing what measurements are currently in place, and how they handle risk. The calls for views concerns UK data storage including interconnection within data centres, cloud platform infrastructures and managed service provider infrastructures.

The government hopes that the call for views will help them to understand the current landscape of UK data storage, and the potential options to best support data storage and processing infrastructure providers in the future. They will be addressing the risks in three parts, with a series of 14 questions. The three parts are as follows:

Part 1: Risks to UK data storage and processing infrastructure

These risks include unwanted access to large-scale data and the disruption of digital services underpinned via the infrastructure.

Part 2: Security and resilience of data centres

This section aims to understand the effectiveness of existing measures in place that impact security and resilience risks to data centres.

2.1: Existing security and resilience measures

The government is seeking to understand how the risks mentioned in part 1 are addressed are currently managed.

2.2: Exploration of potential security and resilience measures

The government already has a number of comparable interventions that have been deployed, this includes incident response information sharing, security penetration testing, security resilience requirements and more. The government aims to understand whether or not these types of intervention, and any others, would be effective if they were used to manage risks to data centres.

Part 3: Mapping the impacts of risks

In this section, they ask data storage and processing operators to share who is impacted when data centres and the digital services are compromised, and the extent to which they are impacted.

The views collated from this report will provide the government with a ground for developing a stronger risk management framework to help protect the large-scale data storage and processing.

With these developments comes an increasing demand for cyber security specialists. Cyber security roles can range from Cyber Security Architect, Cyber Security Engineer, and Cyber Security Analyst. Click here to see our current cyber security job opportunities or here to read about the growing demand for cyber security professionals in 2022.

This calls for views will run until Sunday 24^th July 2022, where all stakeholders with any insight are able to respond either as an individual or as an organisation. For more details on submitting responses, you can find out more here.