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

itnews.com.au

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

#51

Post by thedougd »

cameronh90 wrote: post #38
dsign wrote: post #10

The risk Bank of England doesn't like comes with the territory, and everybody who uses public cloud is subject to it. The only difference is that smaller companies don't have a big megaphone or the clout that they have, and must either accept the terms and shut up or find an alternate solution. If Bank of England wants to use their power constructively, they can literally go shopping for data center and IT companies…

The risk that they're concerned with is if every bank is using AWS, then AWS goes down, the entire UK economy crashes until it's back up. Even if AWS itself is more reliable than every bank's on-prem solution, that's no good if it goes down for everyone simultaneously and I can't just use a backup credit card.

Exactly, they're concerned with the systemic risk. As an example, there's no visibility or processes in place to ensure that all these banks aren't sharing the same availability zone.

They're likely only looking for ways to mitigate these risks, not necessarily a complete return to self-hosting.

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

#53

Post by ChrisArchitect »

ChrisArchitect wrote: post #52

original/source article on Reuters: https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/bank-englan... ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27819016 ) any other more detailed breakdown of this somewhere?

How reliant are banks and insurers on cloud outsourcing? https://www.bankofengland.co.uk/bank-overground/2020/how-rel... (January 2020)

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

#54

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

game_the0ry wrote: post #50

I worked in a brand-name bank, so I am familiar with the goings in the tech side of finance. Call me crazy, but I would trust aws, microsoft, and google with my PII and finances before I would trust Wells, BofA, JPMC, Goldman, et al. The cloud giants pay their engineers more and technologists are second-class citizens at the financial institutions - infer what you want from that.

My understanding is that at least Chase, Blackrock, and Visa are rapidly raising their pay for new engineering / analyst hires. Is this not true?

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

#55

Post by throwaway_2047 »

DrBazza wrote: 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,…

What about having regulations updated instead of bending the industry backward to fit the outdated regulations?

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

#56

Post by cm2187 »

jon-wood wrote: post #28
gizdan wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ne…

I doubt the payment systems would run on a 3rd party cloud provider. But there are many other systems used by a bank, to calculate their risks, run their accounting, do their regulatory reporting, all the network drives that are used across the bank, emails, that could be killed in such a scenario. That alone is enough to threaten the stability of the banking system.

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

#57

Post by game_the0ry »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #54
game_the0ry wrote: post #50

I worked in a brand-name bank, so I am familiar with the goings in the tech side of finance. Call me crazy, but I would trust aws, microsoft, and google with my PII and finances before I would trust Wells, BofA, JPMC, Goldman, et al. The cloud giants pay their engineers more and technologists are second-class citizens at the financial institutions - infer what you want from that.

My understanding is that at least Chase, Blackrock, and Visa are rapidly raising their pay for new engineering / analyst hires. Is this not true?

I can speak for the bank I worked at - this is true, but the base pay level was very low to begin with and the increase is nowhere near competitive for the most talented engineers. Also, the experienced engineers at those companies are salty about new hires making more then they are.

Again, this stems from the culture of financial institutions where tech workers are viewed as support staff, not strategically critical, despite what financial institutions say publicly.

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

#58

Post by ZeroCool2u »

game_the0ry wrote: post #50

I worked in a brand-name bank, so I am familiar with the goings in the tech side of finance. Call me crazy, but I would trust aws, microsoft, and google with my PII and finances before I would trust Wells, BofA, JPMC, Goldman, et al. The cloud giants pay their engineers more and technologists are second-class citizens at the financial institutions - infer what you want from that.

Definitely agree. In my experience, the financial industry tends to lean heavily on checklists and bureaucracy to enforce security. This requires additional headcount and prevents automation.

Technology companies lean the other way and enforce security through comprehensive automation of the controls they must follow.

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

#59

Post by ZeroCool2u »

onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #54
game_the0ry wrote: post #50

I worked in a brand-name bank, so I am familiar with the goings in the tech side of finance. Call me crazy, but I would trust aws, microsoft, and google with my PII and finances before I would trust Wells, BofA, JPMC, Goldman, et al. The cloud giants pay their engineers more and technologists are second-class citizens at the financial institutions - infer what you want from that.

My understanding is that at least Chase, Blackrock, and Visa are rapidly raising their pay for new engineering / analyst hires. Is this not true?

I know for a fact that base pay for a first year SWE with a BS+MS in CS at Goldman just broke $100k a couple years ago. That probably sounds like a lot to most people, but if you're hiring staff to live and work in NYC, especially when there's an absolutely massive Google campus 10 minutes North of the GS HQ, that's pretty much table stakes. Never mind the glaring cultural differences.

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

#60

Post by handrous »

throwaway_2047 wrote: post #55
DrBazza wrote: 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,…

What about having regulations updated instead of bending the industry backward to fit the outdated regulations?

What's outdated about it?
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