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> What exactly is the concern here? Top of the article: > Concentration of compute could threaten financial stability. If BigCloud goes down, so does banking

by pmlnr 5y ago

> What exactly is the concern here? Top of the article: > Concentration of compute could threaten financial stability. If BigCloud goes down, so does banking, and banking doesn't seem to like that - and I'm with them.

cm2187 5y ago
Also changing IT in a bank is slow, dead slow. A bank wouldn’t be able to cope with being booted overnight from its infrastructure Parler-style.
- nindalf 5y ago
  That FUD is unwarranted. No bank is going to be kicked off it’s infrastructure. Bringing up Parler seems completely irrelevant.
  - gizdan 5y ago
    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.
    - wdb 5y ago
      Guess, as Bank you just need to make sure you have Amazon and Google as customer :)
    - pjc50 5y ago
      Kick a UK bank off cloud infrastructure for no good reason and you will get rung up by the PM, who will make it clear that you will reinstate them or be forever banned from government procurement.
      - csomar 5y ago
        The issue is that the Cloud provider is not UK-based. If they were to ban a bank, it's probably due to pressure from their own government (US) who could be having some problems with their client's government (UK). It's not like it is not happening right now.
      - gizdan 5y ago
        Sure, just like all the other people who have been called to parliament and suffered the consequences. Ah wait.. Our current leaders are useless in this regard. They'll be given a stern warning letter and nothing will come of it.
    - sokoloff 5y ago
      I have little doubt that the major cloud providers would be willing to contractually bind themselves to a notice and appeals period that would suffice for “because we don’t want your business anymore” reasons. The cross-bank correlated technical outages and general “fear of the new (15 years now, but continually being enhanced and changed)” is harder to get beyond.
      - gizdan 5y ago
        Notice and appeals period isn't good enough. It takes UK banks millions to migrate to a cloud provider. Being given a notice period just means they have less than x amount of time to potentially spend equally as much as it took for them to get onto the cloud provider in the first place.
    - jon-wood 5y ago
      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 new provider.
      - cm2187 5y ago
        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.
      - andylynch 5y ago
        Any provider offering this kind of service is exceptionally unlikely to offboard any financial services firm without serious forethought- any outsourcing of critical processes like this would need pre-approval from the FCA and for a bank the PRA would take a hard look too.
    - pmlnr 5y ago
      I have my own horror story, and that's not even about the cloud, just how centralizing a service magnifies issues. I work for near FAANG company who still sends important email information out to people. One day, many years ago, a new gmail feature landed: automatic smart tabs - and ALL of our email started landing in promotions. And those mails were send from IP addresses which were dedicated for these and only these kind of email, so we started to panic. We started going through the correct channels for reporting this as a problem, at which point we got a "cheers, we'll get back to you in 2 weeks". At that point we were certain we were loosing money in the millions soon, so we walked over to marketing - Google PPC (pay per click) to be specific, and asked them to get hold of someone high enough at Google, we don't care how, or over what channel. Within an hour, the change in gmail to put everything in promotions that was "noreply@" was rolled back, and our arses were saved. If we were still in the early 2000s with countless small email servers and providers, if one of them done this, their customers would be angry at them. But since people believe Gmail is their saviour - and because nobody can get hold of anyone at google to report a problem - now it was our fault, despite the fact that we had absolutely no idea what went wrong, and there were no changes on our side. My summary? Fuck the cloud and the centralized services; I want the small, loosely connected internet services back.
  - h_anna_h 5y ago
    A lot of people hate banks and want them to go down, just like how a lot of people hate Parler.
MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
This is obvious, concentration of risk is a legitimate concern. I was specifically wondering about the "dictate terms and conditions - as well as prices" line, which sounds bullshit to me.
JackFr 5y ago
If the ATM stops working because of an AWS outage, I will very much be disappointed in my banking regulator.
lbriner 5y ago
How is that different than the banks own systems? In the UK, we have seen about 4 or 5 really bad system failures in banks leading to unpaid salaries/bills etc. and I believe all of them were on-prem. Sure, hedge your bets but I would hope that most people using cloud are smart enough to at least get it 95% cloud-agnostic so if price gouging occurs, they can leave.

by pmlnr 5y ago

cm2187 5y ago

Also changing IT in a bank is slow, dead slow. A bank wouldn’t be able to cope with being booted overnight from its infrastructure Parler-style.

nindalf 5y ago
That FUD is unwarranted. No bank is going to be kicked off it’s infrastructure. Bringing up Parler seems completely irrelevant.
- gizdan 5y ago
  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.
  - wdb 5y ago
    Guess, as Bank you just need to make sure you have Amazon and Google as customer :)
  - pjc50 5y ago
    Kick a UK bank off cloud infrastructure for no good reason and you will get rung up by the PM, who will make it clear that you will reinstate them or be forever banned from government procurement.
    - csomar 5y ago
      The issue is that the Cloud provider is not UK-based. If they were to ban a bank, it's probably due to pressure from their own government (US) who could be having some problems with their client's government (UK). It's not like it is not happening right now.
    - gizdan 5y ago
      Sure, just like all the other people who have been called to parliament and suffered the consequences. Ah wait.. Our current leaders are useless in this regard. They'll be given a stern warning letter and nothing will come of it.
  - sokoloff 5y ago
    I have little doubt that the major cloud providers would be willing to contractually bind themselves to a notice and appeals period that would suffice for “because we don’t want your business anymore” reasons. The cross-bank correlated technical outages and general “fear of the new (15 years now, but continually being enhanced and changed)” is harder to get beyond.
    - gizdan 5y ago
      Notice and appeals period isn't good enough. It takes UK banks millions to migrate to a cloud provider. Being given a notice period just means they have less than x amount of time to potentially spend equally as much as it took for them to get onto the cloud provider in the first place.
  - jon-wood 5y ago
    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 new provider.
    - cm2187 5y ago
      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.
    - andylynch 5y ago
      Any provider offering this kind of service is exceptionally unlikely to offboard any financial services firm without serious forethought- any outsourcing of critical processes like this would need pre-approval from the FCA and for a bank the PRA would take a hard look too.
  - pmlnr 5y ago
    I have my own horror story, and that's not even about the cloud, just how centralizing a service magnifies issues. I work for near FAANG company who still sends important email information out to people. One day, many years ago, a new gmail feature landed: automatic smart tabs - and ALL of our email started landing in promotions. And those mails were send from IP addresses which were dedicated for these and only these kind of email, so we started to panic. We started going through the correct channels for reporting this as a problem, at which point we got a "cheers, we'll get back to you in 2 weeks". At that point we were certain we were loosing money in the millions soon, so we walked over to marketing - Google PPC (pay per click) to be specific, and asked them to get hold of someone high enough at Google, we don't care how, or over what channel. Within an hour, the change in gmail to put everything in promotions that was "noreply@" was rolled back, and our arses were saved. If we were still in the early 2000s with countless small email servers and providers, if one of them done this, their customers would be angry at them. But since people believe Gmail is their saviour - and because nobody can get hold of anyone at google to report a problem - now it was our fault, despite the fact that we had absolutely no idea what went wrong, and there were no changes on our side. My summary? Fuck the cloud and the centralized services; I want the small, loosely connected internet services back.
- h_anna_h 5y ago
  A lot of people hate banks and want them to go down, just like how a lot of people hate Parler.

MrBuddyCasino 5y ago

This is obvious, concentration of risk is a legitimate concern. I was specifically wondering about the "dictate terms and conditions - as well as prices" line, which sounds bullshit to me.

JackFr 5y ago

If the ATM stops working because of an AWS outage, I will very much be disappointed in my banking regulator.

lbriner 5y ago

How is that different than the banks own systems? In the UK, we have seen about 4 or 5 really bad system failures in banks leading to unpaid salaries/bills etc. and I believe all of them were on-prem. Sure, hedge your bets but I would hope that most people using cloud are smart enough to at least get it 95% cloud-agnostic so if price gouging occurs, they can leave.