NEWS
Information and Communication Technology (ICT) plays an essential role across society, and contribute to foster the digital transition. Up-to-date, quality ICT professional standards underpin the digital ecosystem by applying a common language and identifying the essential professional benchmarks required to ensure high-quality ICT service provision.
Data centres have a notoriously high demand of resources: the massively increasing demand for IT services of all kinds continues to lead to rising consumption of (among others) electricity, water and refrigerants. Therefore, it is part of the daily business of a data centre operator to optimise facilities and infrastructures in terms of energy consumption and thus improve the environmental sustainability of the data centre.
The new Fertilising Products Regulation (FPR) (Regulation (EU) 2019/1009) will enter into force in July 2022, repealing Regulation (EC) No 2003/2003. The new Regulation introduces new requirements related to quality, safety, and labelling of fertilizing products and extends the scope to organic fertilizers, organo-mineral fertilizers, growing media, biostimulants, and other products. The Regulation also harmonises EU rules for products derived from waste organic materials and by-products and provides rules to recover nutrients into secondary raw materials.
Mobile devices represent a unique challenge for law enforcement. Due to their wide use, they underpin many criminal investigations. Moreover, criminal offenders, organised crime and terrorist organisations use mobile devices for various purposes, which faces criminal prosecution with many challenges. Law enforcement need not only to access the data stored on mobile devices, but also to provide it as court evidence in a trustworthy and reliable manner.
To aid in the development of a European Professional ICT workforce, it is important to provide education and training fit to meet the requirements of the ICT professional community. This requires enhanced approaches to address the education of new and existing ICT practitioners and the need for continuous professional development.
Privacy and personal data protection are essential in our current society as our offline and digital experiences are increasingly entwined. To ensure that these essential values are taken into account early on in the development of products and services, newly developed EN 17529 ‘Data protection and privacy by design and by default’ provides manufacturers and service providers with requirements before, or independently of, any specific application integration.
The protection of critical infrastructure is essential in complex societies as the ones we are all living in. To optimise the protection through prevention, CEN recently developed new standard EN 17483-1 ‘Private security services - Protection of critical infrastructure - Part 1: General requirements’.
CEN recently published new standard EN ISO 15253 ‘Ophthalmic optics and instruments — Optical and electro-optical devices for enhancing low vision’. The new standard specifies requirements for manufacturers of instruments for use by the visually impaired as low vision aids.
CEN-CLC/JTC 14 ‘Energy management and energy efficiency in the framework of energy transition’ (JTC 14) just published new EN 17463 ‘Valuation of Energy related investments (VALERI)’. The standard is an important breakthrough in the developing field of “green finance”, and it was the result of the efforts of many European experts invested in this work during the difficult time of the pandemic.
Environmental Product Declarations (EPD) present quantified environmental information on the life cycle of a product, thus enabling comparisons between products fulfilling the same function. They are based on the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, as described in the EN ISO 14040 series of standards.