Four of the biggest cloud technology firms in the world have been designated CTPs or Critical third parties in a bid to strengthen the UK financial system’s resilience.
The UK government carried out the designation to bring financial sector services offered by Oracle, Microsoft, Google Cloud and AWS Amazon Web Services under the oversight of the Financial Conduct Authority, the Prudential Regulation Authority and the Bank of England. This oversight began on July 12 after a period of, what the government called ‘collaborative engagement’ and ‘evidence gathering’. It is expected that more providers could also be designated in what has been called a ‘rolling regime’.
Cloud reliance
Just as FCA compliance consultants such as https://www.adempi.co.uk/ continually work to keep abreast of sector and market changes, this regulatory oversight programme aims to address the increasing reliance on cloud services by financial market infrastructures, insurers and banks. It aims to get ahead of the type of disruption that could be caused if a problem occurred with a major supplier and affected multiple firms simultaneously.
Future-proofing
The oversight aims to ensure that company services have robust arrangements to identify, deal with, and recover from any operational issues that affect critical services in the financial sector. Regulators will work to address any risks that could affect critical services’ continuity by working with the third parties, assessing resilience and gathering information. Regulators will be able to enforce CTP rules if necessary and create regulations if needed. The companies involved have backed the initiative in public.
