Big Tech cloud services could face resilience test, says Bank of England

Amazon (AMZN.O), Google (GOOGL.O) and other tech companies providing cloud computing to banks in Britain may have to comply with minimum resilience standards and testing, a senior Bank of England official said on Monday.

The BoE, along with regulators in Europe and the United States, is worried about the reliance of banks on a handful of Big Tech firms for cloud computing in increasingly critical banking services, and the impact an outage at one of them could have on financial stability. read more

“This is a big topic both within the UK and internationally,” Victoria Saporta, BoE executive director for prudential supervision, told an event held by the Institute of International Finance, a global banking industry body.

A global approach would be best, she said.

“Our current thinking is that the most effective … approach to managing these risks from critical third party services providers is through a combination of minimum resilience standards aimed directly at critical third parties … coupled with resilience testing of these critical third parties,” Saporta said. Reuters