What you need to know
- Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have scored increased attention from the UK's Prudential Regulation Authority.
- A new report indicates the regulatory body is figuring out how to best oversee these companies' operations.
- The need for increased involvement on regulators' parts comes as a result of a mounting fear over cyber attacks and other dangers that could threaten third-party operations and, by extension, those of the UK citizenry.
What do Microsoft, Amazon, and Google have in common? Well, a number of things, but among those is the fact that the UK's Prudential Regulation Authority is taking an expanded look at the trio's cloud operations and how they may require additional oversight.
According to a report by the Financial Times, the risk of outages or cyber attacks on the big three cloud providers is proving motivation enough for the Prudential Regulation Authority to start figuring out how to increase scrutiny of the trio so that third-party service issues aren't in a position to cripple the country's banking infrastructure.
Beyond more oversight, the PRA is considering more disaster recovery tests and prep as a way to ensure "operational resilience." This renewed scrutiny comes not long after an Amazon Web Services outage that took place in December of 2021.
- Microsoft's OpenAI "tech bromance" dodges UK merger probe — as it builds in-house models and tests DeepSeek in Copilot to break away from the ChatGPT maker
- SoftBank could steal Microsoft's title as the exclusive cloud provider and largest investor to OpenAI as $500B "Stargate" projects a $20B loss by 2027
This particular regulatory inquiry is far from the only investigation the UK is doing with regards to Microsoft, its services, and its activities. The company's software bundling practices — specifically with regards to how tightly woven Windows, Teams, Office, and OneDrive are — have managed to get the attention of the UK, though the consequences of that review haven't yet come to fruition, at least publicly.
And the UK's regulators are also hard at work keeping tabs on companies that aren't the aforementioned cloud trio, such as with its ongoing probe of NVIDIA's Arm acquisition. That's the same acquisition the FTC is striking at with a lawsuit.
