Snoopers’ Charter will cause extreme rise in business costs
The UK Government’s Investigatory Powers Bill, dubbed ‘Snoopers’ Charter’ by critics, has already been met with contention from tech giants, Google, Facebook and Microsoft, who have stressed they will not voluntarily co-operate with it. New research by IP EXPO Europe reveals that nearly three in five (58%) of UK IT departments fear an increase in business costs as a result of it.
Critics have highlighted that rapidly deploying a legislation to ‘spy’ on the general public will cost up to £1.8 billion of taxpayers’ money to implement. But IT professionals face concerns around the business costs of implementing new technology to collect, store and monitor consumer data for up to 12 months, as required by the draft regulation.
Bradly Maule-ffinch, IP EXPO Europe’s director of strategy, says: “Although the Government’s latest bill is designed to address national security concerns, it needs to find a way of mitigating against cyber threats without passing the costs on to businesses and consumers.”
The research also found that over half of UK IT departments (52%) believe the IT security threat level is higher than it was last year, while nearly four in five (78%) respondents believe the Government needs to invest more in national cyber security efforts.
“Security still struggles to be recognised in the IT environment, and this is quite daunting given the prevalence of cyberattacks on companies and governments,” says Catalin Cosoi, Chief Security Strategist at Bitdefender. “The more sophisticated the attacks, the more work companies have to do to prepare and test response plans to mitigate data breaches and ultimately, create a more resilient and agile business. Consequently, higher cyber security threat levels translate into increased security expenses.”
IT leaders in the East Midlands expressed most concern (70%) around the costs they will face once the regulation has been passed, followed closely by those in the East of England (63%), London (62%) and the South East (62%).