IMDA regulations recognise the importance of developing and adhering to infocomm standards, which are crucial in ensuring a safe, reliable, and interoperable digital ecosystem. Infocomm standards in Singapore are developed on a consensus basis and are the results of the collaborative efforts amongst government agencies, tertiary institutions, professional bodies, and the infocomm industry. IMDA plays a key role in fostering and facilitating the industry's participation in local and international ICT standards forums, including its Secretariat role to the IT Standards Committee (ITSC), helping to helm Singapore’s IT standards development effort. Through its involvement in these forums, IMDA is able to promote the adoption of best practices and standards in cloud security policies, enabling businesses and consumers to make informed decisions about the use of cloud services.
The use of cloud platforms has been increasingly used to catalyse and support the delivery of seamless digital services, and it also enhances the vibrancy and growth of infocomm sector. Nonetheless, cloud security remains an impediment to the adoption of cloud services. It is thus important to establish cloud security standards, building trust and transparency for enterprises’ adoption of cloud services. A multi-tiered cloud security standard and a cloud outage incident response guide were developed.
Internet of Things (IoT) helps to blend the physical environment and objects with traditional Information and Communication Technology (ICT) so that they can interact with one another seamlessly. This technology can be harnessed to improve the quality of life of our citizens, improve efficiency and enable new business models for our enterprises. To realise these potentials, it is necessary to establish and adopt interoperability and cybersecurity standards and best practices for IoT.
Many innovative applications and programs are made possible through the use of data. Standards for data services aim to provide guidance so that data can be meaningfully consumed by the applications and facilitate interoperability across multiple systems. IMDA plays a key role in developing and enforcing data protection policies and data centre regulations in Singapore, which are designed to promote the safe and secure storage and processing of data.
Digital identity and e-payment are the foundations for delivery of many digital services. IMDA and our partners will continue to focus on development of standards for strong digital identity and secure digital payment technologies to combat both identity and payment frauds while at the same time, support seamless interoperability of identity and payment solutions across different digital platforms.
Two local Technical Committees under the purview of IT Standards Committee have been formed to mirror and participate in the activities of standards developing organisations (SDOs) in the area of Artificial Intelligence (ISO/IEC JTC1 SC42) and Blockchain & Distributed Ledger Technology (ISO TC307). They aim to support some of the pioneering initiatives that attempt to exploit the use of such emerging technologies.
To reduce energy consumption and operating costs of data centres and enhance their competitiveness, IMDA partnered with other government agencies and the industry to develop a Singapore Standard for Green Data Centres under the ITSC. The Standard provides organisations with a framework as well as a logical and consistent methodology to achieve continuous improvements in energy efficiency in their data centre facilities.
Compliance to standards can be exhibited in several ways. Level of assurance differs in objectivity and continuity in time scale while at the same time, level of visibility and transparency may also vary. Certification is one of the means to demonstrate compliance to the customers that the products or services meet their expectations. Specifically in the area of cloud computing standards, IMDA has developed an MTCS certification scheme to encourage the adoption of SS 584: 2015 Specification for multi-tiered cloud computing security (MTCS).
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