The Prudential Regulation Authority (UK) is the successor of the Financial Services Authority (FSA), which is responsible for managing supervision, building societies, insurers and major investment firms, according to Wiki. This time around, the PRA is concerned about our dependency on major cloud providers such as Azure, AWS and Google Cloud.
Cloud covers a big part of our tech life, undoubtedly one of the most phenomenal services available today. Before the cloud became a scaling infrastructure, companies had to manually make their own data centres. And it is not cheap to make in house data centres.
Potential threats of cyberattacks were of a higher rate in some companies due to the specific targetability of cyber attackers. Some companies would face constant collisions with attackers and nothing to gain.
With the implementation of mass-market cloud technology, large tech providers adopted business secrets in the sector. The largest eCommerce business globally, Amazon, had a fair share of exposure in the cloud industry.
What was made as a child project under the e-commerce wings, the cloud business has become so vast it can now rival the parent company in revenue margin.
Thinking of it makes phenomenal sense of how far we’ve come in the cloud technology sector. AWS is now one of the biggest names in the cloud industry, gains billions in revenue every year and only expanding.
Financial regulators are concerned about how big these companies have become. They have so much freedom to dictate how cloud business should work. It’s not only AWS that’s the crowned king. It has to share a place with Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. They are tech giants themselves with trillion-dollar market evaluation.
The PRA, as we said, is concerned about the matter and looking for a way to get more data from these three big cloud providers. A subnet of cloud providers is making reliance on competitive cloud computing providers.
Of course, there are many vendors providing cloud services; they have to compete with these giants of companies. The big three has unmatched resources and funding capacity, which everyone can agree on. So, competing with them is not as easy as it seems.
Experts suggest these already famous cloud giants will drive market growth by 37 per cent in 2022. A tech HQ report made on 13 November 2020 said, ‘combined $2B in just three months,’ which is pretty huge. Having large footprints to follow has its benefits too.
Smaller providers target to provide more or similar services to keep up. Without them, customers would have a hard choice in picking up the right portfolio for the company. Also, the fact remains that large companies who need an extended bit of support will easily lean towards the largest cloud providers.
The Prequential Regulation Authority (PRA) is determined on finding more ways to access data from the likes of AWS, Google Cloud and Azure. Financial Times reported ‘UK financial regulators to step up scrutiny of cloud computing giants.’
The big trio, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud, has more market share combined than the rest of the cloud providers of the world as a whole, which makes sense since they are the innovators in not only cloud computing but also another cutting-edge tech.
The PRA, a part of the Bank of England (BoE), has a substantial capability in regulatory management. BoE warned that the UK banks are moving more and more towards their administration and could potentially pose a risk to financial stability.’ The move brought up arguments on highly concentrated cloud services such as AWS, Azure and GC.