UK to class data centres as 'critical national infrastructure'

LONDON (Reuters) - Britain's data centres will be classified "critical national infrastructure", the government said on Thursday, giving the servers and I.T. systems that underpin the country's communications extra protection from cyber attacks.

Britain said the move would reassure companies building data centres, such as DC01UK, which it said had submitted proposals for a 3.75 billion pound ($4.88 billion) investment in Europe's largest data centre in Hertfordshire.

On Wednesday, Amazon's cloud computing arm, Amazon Web Services, said it would to spend 8 billion pounds in Britain over the next five years to build and operate data centres.

The government said the new designation would put data centres on an equal footing with water and energy, and allow it to minimise damage to the economy in the event of critical incidents.

"Bringing data centres into the Critical National Infrastructure regime will allow better coordination and cooperation with the government against cyber criminals and unexpected events," technology minister Peter Kyle said.

A number of 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.

($1 = 0.7680 pounds)

(Reporting by Sarah Young, Editing by Paul Sandle)