Cloud giants could face greater scrutiny from UK financial regulators - reports

The Prudential Regulation Authority is preparing to increase its monitoring of AWS, Azure and Google Cloud

The UK's Prudential Regulation Authority is reportedly preparing to increase its monitoring of the world's biggest cloud providers.

According to the Financial Times, the financial services regulator is looking for ways to access more data from Amazon, Google and Microsoft because of the impact that service outages and cyberattacks would have on British banks.

Citing people familiar with the plans, the report states that the Prudential Regulation Authority is considering implementing more robust outages and disaster recovery tests given the increasing reliance UK banks have on a handful of cloud providers.

This could include the introduction of a "war game" which models AWS and Azure failing at the same time, executives told the newspaper.

Banks have continued to turn to the world's biggest cloud vendors in recent years, with AWS having announced deals with Barclays and HSBC, while Lloyd Banking Group holds partnerships with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.

And there is said to be increasing concern over the level of disruption that would be caused if one or more of these cloud services were to fail at the same time.

The Prudential Regulation Authority did not provide comment, but FT claims the financial regulator is set to publish a joint discussion paper with the Bank of England and the Financial Conduct Authority on the issues raised by cloud computing.