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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

#121

Something to keep in mind here: The employees of the Bank of England are ultimately government employees. They are subjected to the pay scales dictated by bureaucrats and politicians. Of course, they can't attract the caliber of engineers that works for large commercial cloud providers, so they have to settle for programmers that didn't make the cut. And the leadership is non-technical and from the financial and gove…

From my understanding of the article, the BoE aren't concerned about their own infrastructure. They're concerned about all the major retail banks using the same cloud provider and then that provider having a major outage. Individual banks having an outage is an issue but one that can be handled. Three or four of the main banks all going down at once could be catastrophic.

> They're concerned about all the major retail banks using the same cloud provider and then that provider having a major outage.

I wouldn't worry too much about that. Major outages are exceedingly rare. I can't say the same for on-prem infrastructure.

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

#122
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, at least AWS, Azure etc. all have a vested interest in doing things well and securely. At a bank, most employees know nothing and care nothing about the HW and SW systems, they just use and abuse them.

Why do you think banks don't have vested interest? And I don't expect my cleaner to service my car. Banks have DBAs, network and physical security experts on tap (just like cloud providers do).

Well they do have the vested interest but they are predictably irrational in another one - trying to make more money and cutting costs from "non-core businesses". It isn't rational but certain sorts of predictable stupidity are more common in some contexts than others.

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

#123
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,…

OS is reproducible with artifact repositories for OS and library packages. Hardware perhaps less so, but I guess a custom deal could be worked out with the right supplier. That, or go with emulation.

Emulation can technically have some frustrating difference quirks - which suggests a "stupid but works" source of consistency by using emulated environments from day one.
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