Britain's cloud habit has become a billion-pound risk

Amid calls for digital sovereignty, a report warns that more than 60 percent of UK companies depend on cloud services for critical functions, and an outage in one or more of the big providers could prove costly. Researchers at the Cyber Monitoring Centre nonprofit found a high level of cloud dependence among British firms, …

[Pascal Monett]

Only a billion pounds ?

Pah. Pocket change.

Call them when it reaches a trillion pounds and their retirement is in danger.

Then they might do something about it . . .

[Yet Another Anonymous coward]

Re: Only a billion pounds ?

Was pleasantly surprised Britain still had a billion pound economy

[Excused Boots]

Re: Only a billion pounds ?

It's about 4.2 trillion.

[elsergiovolador]

Rivers

The researchers also found that rivers are wet.

Businesses should stop listening to VCs that have conflicts of interest and stop using AWS and other US platforms that are covered by Cloud Act.

[TimMaher]

Re: Rivers are wet

Not around here they are not.

[Anonymous Coward]

C-Level Execs Have A Specific Remedy In Mind............

That would be the UK taxpayer!

Yup.....JLR/Tata infrastructure goes belly up......................

.........and the UK taxpayer gets to guarantee a £1.5Billion loan!

.........Please don't tell me about "digital sovereignty"...............Tata Consulting

designed an "open architecture" for JLR............

.........so the loan bailed out a technical screw up by an INDIAN company......."sovereignty" be damned!

[FIA]

Re: C-Level Execs Have A Specific Remedy In Mind............

So JLR doesn't employ anyone in the UK? There were no risks to UK employees?

That loan isn't going to be paid back?

There won't be any interest on those loan repayments?

What are you annoyed about?

JLR is owned by Tata, but seems to be largely UK based., and a not insignificant employer.

Just to be clear, if JLR wasn't Indian owned it wouldn't be here, at all.

British Layland did a spectacular job of slowly destroying itself. No foreign ownership needed.

[Albert Coates]

Re: C-Level Execs Have A Specific Remedy In Mind............

"British Layland"

Hmm, are you thinkng of 'Layla' by Eric Clapton, or British Leyland, the apogee of abysmal car design and engineering, eg the Austin Allegro, Morris Ital, Triumph Stag (one of worst 50 cars ever made, according to Time magazine) - no-one gave a damn, not the manglement or the workers.

[Anonymous Coward]

Clouds are temporary

and will often piss rain on you and then it is gone like will 0'the wisp.

Some of us have been warning people for years about using off-prem cloud services like AWS or Azure.

Your data is at the mercy of a 3rd party. You take the risk and most of the time it pays off. When it fails, it fails big time.

Better get that Resume up to date...

[Dr Dan Holdsworth]

Re: Clouds are temporary

If you're relying on cloud services, then you are also relying on all the networking between you and them functioning. Added to that you are relying further on the power grid to those datacentres not having issues as well. Now here's where all of this gets technical...

The Earth's magnetic field is not static. Every so often it swaps over; magnetic north becomes magnetic south. During the swap-over the field strength drops to zero then builds back up again. The earth's magnetic field is what protects us from solar storms, which are enormous charged clouds of gas thrown out by the sun; if these get past the earth's magnetic field and hit the planet then lots of things get hurt. Specifically power lines, being long lines of conductors, get huge currents induced in them. This causes breakers to trip out and shut down the power grid to protect itself, clobbering datacentres in the process.

This is not an abstract threat; the magnetic field of earth is due a pole-swap and this is happening as we speak. We don't really know how long it will take, but we do know that whilst it is happening power grids will be very unstable.

[Sproggit]

Re: Clouds are temporary

"This is not an abstract threat; the magnetic field of earth is due a pole-swap and this is happening as we speak. We don't really know how long it will take, but we do know that whilst it is happening power grids will be very unstable."

This article in Discovery Magazine from

https://www.discovermagazine.com/earth-s-magnetic-field-flipped-43-million-years-ago-was-there-an-impact-on-life-48915

suggests that this event occurs roughly every 300,000 years and takes around 10,000 years to complete... even though researchers found that one event, around 43,000,000 years ago, lasted up to 80,000 years.

For anyone reading this and wondering, "How on earth do we know that the poles have reversed, and how could we possibly know how long it takes?" the answer comes from the geologic record. Molten rock contains particles and atoms of e.g. iron - metals that exhibit magnetic properties. As the molten rock is thrown up from the core to either the surface [or to the bottom of ocean trenches where plates are separating] the molten rock cools and solidifies. However, this solidification happens at a rate slow enough to allow the iron in the molten rock to align itself with the active magnetic field.

Mineralogists have conducted multiple experiments to extract rock cores from ocean trenches and elsewhere and examined the "magnetic orientation" of the contents, which is how we know that the poles have reversed.

Also, because molten rock also carbon and other radioactive isotopes, these decay [like uranium to lead, potassium to argon] while trapped inside the minerals that have crystalized/solidified out from magma.

Taken together, we can establish the age of a rock and the magnetic alignment of the planetary magnetic field that was present when the rock was formed and the time the reversal takes to complete. We also know that the magnetic field is typically reduced - significantly reduced - during the reversal.

To be fair... the interval between "pole flips" can be variable and, as noted, can last between 10,000-80,000 years.

And whilst I'd agree that during this time things like the electrical grid [anything not RFI-hardened] will be impacted... I'd respectfully suggest that we should be much, much, MUCH more concerned with the potential for the cancer risk this will cause. The Earth's magnetic field is what allows life to exist on this planet. The sun throws of a constant blast of extremely high energy particles that are blocked by our Magnetic Field - witness the "Northern Lights" - so that if anything were to happen that would reduce the effective protection we get at the Earth's surface, this would cause all animals - including humans - to develop cancers at a much, much higher rate. It would also break down the DNA in plants and crops.

In a really extreme environment, potentially the only lifeforms that might survive such an event would be those in the oceans.

So yeah, clouds might be temporary... and a magnetic pole swap might play merry hell with the electrical grid. But if that happens any time soon, the electrical grid will be the least of our worries.

[Doctor Syntax]

"This isn't about stepping back from the cloud; it's about recognizing that cloud is now part of our critical infrastructure and designing, governing, and investing accordingly."

Given that the first part of the article is essentially saying that https://xkcd.com/2347/ could be redrawn about cloud structure being propped up be some small rack unit somewhere in an obscure DC how does one design without stepping back?

[Tearsofthemoon]

Wouldn't UK companies and UK Public sector be using eu-west-2 London and not Dublin due to data processing preferences , i.e. not subject to the EU?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to architect moving that all out be my guest. Much is anchored there due to its longevity. GDPR is broadly still highly compatible due to recent Brexit. Many companies also adhere to EU DORA as good practice, having operations there and a demonstration of that from a SOC/audit PoV.

UK Zone … Yes over 3AZ’s… but just another SPOF.

Unlike Azure UK South, at least it’s not full to bursting.

No votes

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to architect moving that all out be my guest. Much is anchored there due to its longevity. GDPR is broadly still highly compatible due to recent Brexit. Many companies also adhere to EU DORA as good practice, having operations there and a demonstration of that from a SOC/audit PoV.

UK Zone … Yes over 3AZ’s… but just another SPOF.

Unlike Azure UK South, at least it’s not full to bursting.

[David Harper 1]

The cloud is just somebody else's computer ...

... over which you have NO control.

[ITMA]

Re: The cloud is just somebody else's computer ...

I've said it before and I'll say it again....

He who owns and controls the hardware your data is on, owns and controls your data...

If that is someone other than you, then YOU do NOT own and control what you think of as "your data".

[ICL1900-G3]

Why?

Why do people engage in this folly? Because they're dedicated followers of fashion.

[Blue Screen of Bleurgh]

And then there's the scores of data breaches, hacks, poor upgrade rollouts and ransomware demands that have befallen various Cloud sites, especially UK government agencies (Craptia) and financial institutions such as Lloyds just a couple of months ago.

The standard response from those companies to its customers is "Oh dear, there's been a technical issue which we didn't see coming, but even though all of your PI has been stolen from our Notepad text file, don't worry, just change your password and hope for the best!"

[ravenviz]

C-level robots like to be seen to be going with the latest trend, in this case cloud services.

What organisations usually lack is a comprehensive service and content management plan, and robust procurement and retention policies.

[Excused Boots]

"C-level robots like to be seen to be going with the latest trend, in this case cloud services."

Yes indeed, it wasn't too long ago that the buzz-word of choice was blockchain. Remind me, how did that work out?

[Will Godfrey]

I would like to say I was surprised (again)

but this was completely predictable and obviously totally the wrong way to go.

[Anonymous Coward]

80% bollox!

80% of FTSE 100? Thats is very very low ... I dealing mainly with FTSE 100 companies for the last 26 years I have never come across one in recent times where Im not logging into a piece of Azure or Aws, or even better logging in to Azure in order to get access AWS servers. I can across a company the other day who use Google, which was a novelty for me.

Working in OCI the other week, all the clients use Entra AD for their authentication to Oracle cloud SAS solutions. Sure you can get access through the Oracle Identity Manager, but if you have a financial application and you have 1000 users, its not trivial operation to create/migrate native accounts for everyone under pressure.... oh and then there are all the integrations between the clouds. Great, you can login now, but none of this weeks data is coming in from SAP, People soft or where ever the desperate/interconnected/spaghetti solutions run.

I have the discussion at work, the outcome is, we may well not be able to work, but none of our clients would be able to work either, so if we stayed up during a big cloud outage we still would not be able to work.

[Anonymous Coward]

'Cloud first' was always a stupid idea

It was just an ealier version of the AI magic sauce thinking we have right now.

Slapping it with the cloud label was assumed to make everything faster, cheaper, better without any additional effort. Just like AI now.

They can work, it's just not the magic that the crayon eaters in the boardroom want it to be

[Anonymous Coward]

There will always be an England

And there will always be clouds over it.