NIS Directive - UK implementation published

The Govenment has published the Network and Information Security Regulations 2018, which will implement the EU NIS Directive in the UK from May 9th. The education sector is not covered by either law.

Where we might have been inadvertently captured was in the provisions for DNS Services. These cover both authoritative domain servers and DNS resolvers, and the thresholds originally proposed by the UK Government would have included large universities at least. Jisc helped DCMS to develop revised thresholds that more accurately reflect the Government's desired coverage. It seems highly unlikely that any university is authoritative for more than a quarter of a million subdomains or provides resolution for more than two million client IP addresses.

The Regulations permit DCMS to bring individual organisations into scope, even though their services fall below the numeric thresholds. It is possible that they may wish to do this for Jisc's operation of the .gov.uk domain. If so we are confident that measures already taken to bring that activity within the scope of our ISO27001 certification will satisfy the law’s requirements.

Thanks to the Jisc DNS team and the universities that provided us with statistics to inform the discussions with DCMS.