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Is Amazon’s cloud service too big to fail?

Financial regulators have raised concerns over concentration risk in a vital area of banking infrastructure, but others say reinforcements are unnecessary

Precariously positioned? Banks reliance on the big providers of cloud-based storage is causing concern
Precariously positioned? Banks reliance on the big providers of cloud-based storage is causing concern Photo: Getty Images

Gavin Jackson, head of Europe, the Middle East and Africa at Amazon Web Services, loves to talk about snowballs. Not the lumps of mush and ice that children chuck at each other, but Amazon’s portable information storage devices, big grey suitcases that hold huge amounts of data.

When clients such as banks sign on with Amazon Web Services, the ecommerce juggernaut’s cloud-computing service, they upload encrypted data from their old legacy IT systems into the snowball, or the larger-capacity snowball edge. These are then shipped to an Amazon data centre where the data is transferred into the AWS cloud.

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