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Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

itnews.com.au

21–30 of 123 posts

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#21
post #8
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also changing IT in a bank is slow, dead slow. A bank wouldn’t be able to cope with being booted overnight from its infrastructure Parler-style.

That FUD is unwarranted. No bank is going to be kicked off it’s infrastructure. Bringing up Parler seems completely irrelevant.

A lot of people hate banks and want them to go down, just like how a lot of people hate Parler.

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#23
post #3

We do business in the US financial sector, and the sentiment we are getting with regard to cloud vs on-prem seems to be growing into a bimodal distribution. I would say it's nearly a 50/50 split until we have conversations about how our product actually works and the incredibly sticky problem that is PII... Once the risks are reviewed in open and honest ways, we find that virtually all of our clients would prefer to…

> Once the risks are reviewed in open and honest ways, we find that virtually all of our clients would prefer to keep our solution on-prem.

I hope this kind of risk assessment becomes more common. I'm used to people not caring until things blow up on their faces.

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#24
Seems a bit like a nothing-article - doesn't make any real point. The FCA/FSA have already been noticing a lot of the financial providers placing 'all their eggs in one basket' and have been putting guidelines in place for banks to have a multi-'cloud' strategy.

[0] https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/finalised-guidance/fg16-5...

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#25
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That FUD is unwarranted. No bank is going to be kicked off it’s infrastructure. Bringing up Parler seems completely irrelevant.

While Parler is somewhat irrelevant and the likelihood of any bank being taken down for similar reasons as Parler, it isn't completely incomprehensible. There have been many horror stories of businesses being banned, blocked, or messed around by Google and Amazon. Their policy does not protect anyone but themselves. It is within the realms of reality for bank to be taken down by them in a matter of days.

I have little doubt that the major cloud providers would be willing to contractually bind themselves to a notice and appeals period that would suffice for “because we don’t want your business anymore” reasons.

The cross-bank correlated technical outages and general “fear of the new (15 years now, but continually being enhanced and changed)” is harder to get beyond.

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#26
Does anyone know if CSPs can be managed via supplier agreements? I’ve always assumed it’s a commodity service and as such there are standard T&Cs, TOS etc. Certainly those in the financial sector wish to manage other types of supplier risk in that way where possible.

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#27
post #3

We do business in the US financial sector, and the sentiment we are getting with regard to cloud vs on-prem seems to be growing into a bimodal distribution. I would say it's nearly a 50/50 split until we have conversations about how our product actually works and the incredibly sticky problem that is PII... Once the risks are reviewed in open and honest ways, we find that virtually all of our clients would prefer to…

> Once the risks are reviewed in open and honest ways, we find that virtually all of our clients would prefer to keep our solution on-prem. I hope this kind of risk assessment becomes more common. I'm used to people not caring until things blow up on their faces.

Well, I guess you are speaking about companies who don't know what they do. But this article speaks about banks, who have hundreds of servers, ability to recover anything, full-time employed ops teams, monitoring & automation in place for 20 years already. Moving to cloud provides very little advantage (definitely not financially) to such companies. They are not SaaS who might need to double their infrastructure overnight. Lots of advantages provided by cloud has been in place years before clouds because of VMWare. Another thing is existing bank apps are often monoliths (when you are happy, in Java with Spring, C# .NET, when not, in Visual Basic, Cobol, PowerBuilder, SAP) or huge interconnected services, huge databases with thousands of stored procedures, SOAP APIs in place. This is not a place where you would leverage ElasticBeanstalk or AWS Lambda.

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#28
post #11
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That FUD is unwarranted. No bank is going to be kicked off it’s infrastructure. Bringing up Parler seems completely irrelevant.

While Parler is somewhat irrelevant and the likelihood of any bank being taken down for similar reasons as Parler, it isn't completely incomprehensible. There have been many horror stories of businesses being banned, blocked, or messed around by Google and Amazon. Their policy does not protect anyone but themselves. It is within the realms of reality for bank to be taken down by them in a matter of days.

These things do happen, but I'd be willing to place money on it not happening to a major financial institution. The day AWS and friends summarily terminate the account of a major UK bank, causing people to lose the ability to access their money, would also be the day that every company in the country immediately pulls out the business continuity plan and digs into the section on dealing with having to migrate to a new provider.

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#29
post #3

We do business in the US financial sector, and the sentiment we are getting with regard to cloud vs on-prem seems to be growing into a bimodal distribution. I would say it's nearly a 50/50 split until we have conversations about how our product actually works and the incredibly sticky problem that is PII... Once the risks are reviewed in open and honest ways, we find that virtually all of our clients would prefer to…

How is the problem of PII better solved on premises?

Re: Bank of England to crack down on 'secretive' cloud computing services

#30
post #20

One of the (legal ?) requirements we had to meet back in the 00s was that financial software (quant code, options trading) was "reproducible" for some length of time (7 years?). That meant: version control (SCCS, CVS, svn), archiving OS versions (SunOS, Solaris), and kit (Sun workstations and servers). I have no idea if the last 2 ("OS", hardware) is even achievable in 2021. I can always get my source code from git,…

I'd expect that if the cloud providers wish to acquire customers that have to comply with those regulations, the cloud providers will have clause in the contract that they are contractually obligated to keep the same services running for that period of time.
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