As a follow-up to the Kakao outage caused by the Pangyo data center fire last October, the Korean government announced amendments to the law that makes large platform and data center operators in the country subject to new obligations regarding disaster prevention, training, response and recovery management.
At a Cabinet meeting held Tuesday, the Ministry of Science and ICT said it passed amendments to the Broadcasting and Communications Development Act, the Information and Communications Network Act, and the Enforcement Decree of the Telecommunications Business Act.
Starting July 4, large platform and data center operators in Korea will be recognized as major broadcasting and communication operators, legally required to come up with strengthened measures in case of disasters. Those subject to the new obligations must submit a disaster management plan to authorities for review. Afterwards, the government may issue corrective orders or impose fines when implementation is considered inadequate.
The move comes as the Financial Supervisory Service reportedly held Kakao Pay responsible for failing to provide adequate backup systems, leading to massive disruptions of Kakao services including bank transactions, online and offline payment systems and overseas payment services.
Platform operators with 10 million or more daily users or the number of daily average domestic traffic volume exceeding 2%, will be subject to the new requirement. As for data center operators, the obligation will be imposed if last year’s sales surpassed 10 billion won (US$ 7.6 million) that manage 22,500 or more square meters of floor area of the facility’s computer room or operate power capacity of over 40 MW.
Businesses that directly operate and manage data centers are subject to the measures if annual sales of their communication services exceed 10 billion won (US$ 7.6 million) or the average number of daily users outpace one million.
Around seven platform operators, including Kakao and Naver and about 10 domestic data centers are expected to meet the conditions. A government-led review committee is expected to be held late next month to finalize business operators subject to the new obligations.
