A recent Financial Times report confirmed the procurement of a high-security cloud system by the UK’s intelligence community. The hosting of sensitive intelligence data on non-government systems is a significant pivot away from traditional practice, where the assumption is that in-house capabilities are relied upon to host sensitive data. The immediate concern about data sovereignty is slightly misleading, as it is most likely that the data is stored and processed on UK soil. However, this public-private partnership between the UK government and Amazon does raise questions relating to the UK’s current lack of sovereign cloud capability, incentives for future UK investment in research and development, and existing oversight mechanisms for big tech and cloud technologies.
UK Intelligence Agencies and the Commercial Cloud: What Does It All Mean? (Ardi Janjeva and James Sullivan, RUSI)
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