• UK’s financial regulators – The Prudential Regulation Authority is looking to increase it’s monitoring of Cloud providers like AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. According to Financial times, they are looking to gain more access to data from these cloud providers because the impact outages and cyberattacks have on British Banks. They are looking at implementing more robust outages and disaster recovery tests given the increasing reliance UK banks have on a handful of cloud providers. A lot of major British banks have partnerships with cloud providers “AWS has announced deals with Barclays and HSBC, while Lloyd Banking Group holds partnerships with Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure.”. There is an increasing concerns about the impacts on the banks should these cloud providers experience outages. You can view the financial times article here
• Speaking of regulators and how they are dealing with cloud providers, a few weeks ago in December Chinese regulators have “suspended an information-sharing partnership with Alibaba Cloud Computing” over concerns that it failed to promptly report and address a cybersecurity vulnerability. According to 21st Century Business Herald, citing a recent notice by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology “Alibaba Cloud did not immediately report vulnerabilities in the popular, open-source logging framework Apache Log4j2 to China’s telecommunications regulator”.This comes after, according to Reuters “The Chinese government has asked state-owned companies to migrate their data from private operators such as Alibaba and Tencent to a state-backed cloud system by next year.” From what we understand, there is no statement from Alibaba Cloud on this yet. You can read more about this here.
• As we look to another year, we wanted to reflect and share few of the cloud security reports published last year and some of their key findings which may be relevant for you
• Gartner reported in August last year Global End-User Spending on Public Cloud Services Expected to Exceed $480 Billion in 2022. They highlighted 4 key trends – Cloud Ubiquity – Cloud is going to be everywhere and spending is expected to increase by another 22% in 2022. Emergence and further adoption of regional and vertical cloud ecosystems and data services to meet security and compliance requirements. Focus on Sustainability and “Carbon-Intelligent” Cloud by Cloud Providers due to market demand for the same. Enhance adoption of fully managed and artificial intelligence/machine-learning (ML)-enabled cloud services. You can read the news report and report here. In Redhat’s Global Tech Outlook 2021 report, Implementing cloud technologies or infrastructure was the 2nd highest priority for  (IT) leaders and decision makers, improving collaboration between business units as being their 1st. To drill further drill down into this priority, the report found that leaders and decision makers prioritise cloud security at their top priority followed by cloud management and application migration to cloud. Nearly 40% of the respondents have a cloud strategy involving more than one cloud – that being hybrid or multi cloud, 60% use two or more clouds currently and most plan to increase their number of cloud providers. This isnt dissimilar to other reports we have featured earlier in the year around the rise of multi and hybrid cloud in the coming years. It is an interesting read and you can read it here

We will continue to share some predictions for 2022 in the upcoming episodes so keep your ears and eyes peeled for that