New law mooted to minimise disruptions due to cloud, data centre outages

Singapore is mulling over a new law to hold cloud services and data centre operators to greater accountability, recognising that any failure of their infrastructure could disrupt Singapore's economy and society.

- Irene Tham

The Digital Infrastructure Act (DIA) comes on the back of recent outages in the banking and healthcare sectors that MPs said have dented public confidence.

"The DIA will focus on digital infrastructure that can cause significant impact on the economy and society, if disrupted," Minister for Communications and Information Josephine Teo told Parliament on March 1.

She said that cloud service players and data centres power a wide array of digital services that enterprises and consumers use daily. These include online banking and payments, e-government services, ride-hailing and digital identity management.

"These operators may, therefore, need to meet higher security and resilience standards to reduce the likelihood of systemic disruptions," Mrs Teo said during the debate on her ministry's budget.

For instance, on Oct 14, 2023, more than 2.5 million payment and ATM transactions could not be completed by DBS Bank and Citibank customers.

The disruptions were caused by a fault in the cooling system of an Equinix data centre used by the two banks.

While the disaster recovery and contingency plans of both banks kicked in, their services were fully restored only in the early hours of Oct 15.