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Google, Microsoft and Amazon have taken part in a tabletop simulation of a "severe" outage of public cloud services, affecting the financial sectors of APAC economies.
The Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) has hosted its inaugural Financial Sector Cloud Resilience Forum, with support from other APAC regulators and big tech cloud service providers.
The forum, which met on November 6, saw participants take part in a simulation of a severe public cloud service incident, disrupting financial sectors throughout APAC.
The exercise enabled forum members to strengthen their mutual understanding of incident response procedures, identify possible supervisory interventions and collaborate on measures to mitigate service disruption.
The exercise also demonstrated the importance of close collaboration and communication between financial regulators and cloud service providers during an incident — to improve situational awareness, inform decision-making and coordinate recovery efforts.
Regulator participants included the central banks of Japan, Thailand, Hong Kong, Malaysia and the Philippines, plus the Australian Prudential Regulation Authority (APRA) and the Indonesian Financial Services Authority (OJK).
Cloud service participants included Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Vincent Loy, chair of the forum and assistant managing director for technology at the MAS, said that exercises such as these are necessary as cloud adoption continues to increase within the financial sector.
“This inaugural exercise is timely as it helps to strengthen processes for responding to a major public cloud incident in the financial sector,” he said.
“Through the exercise, both the financial authorities and cloud service providers have gained deeper insights on how to coordinate their efforts effectively in responding to and recovering from disruptions, and maintain public confidence in the financial sector.”
The forum, which the MAS established in 2023, convenes twice yearly to exchange views on appropriate public cloud risk management practices for the financial sector.
