DSIT is heading up efforts to get to grips with the tech issues recently suffered by the vendor, which holds a large, but unspecified, share of the government cloud market
The recent outage affecting Amazon Web Services affected a range of government departments and their commercial partners, and exploratory work led by Whitehall tech experts “will take some time to fully understand the scale of the impact”, a minister has said.
On Monday of last week, the cloud vendor revealed that one of its datacentre facilities in the US was experiencing “increased error rates and latencies for multiple AWS services”. A wide range of organisations around the world were reported to be affected – including HM Revenue and Customs and its Government Gateway login system – which has 50 million registered users in the UK – as well as banks Lloyds, Halifax and the Bank of Scotland, and UK telcos including BT, EE and Sky Mobile. Widely used websites and consumer services were also reportedly affected, including Reddit, Slack, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, in addition to Peloton bikes and Ring doorbells.
While the outages were seemingly quite short-lived, the government was quick to confirm it had rolled out formal incident-response arrangements and was engaging with AWS.
And, a week on, digital government minister Ian Murray has revealed that the response is ongoing, and is being led by the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. This process is set to take some time, and will begin with efforts to get a handle on the effects of the AWS tech issues.
“DSIT continues to work across government and with businesses to understand the full impacts of the outage,” Murray said. “All AWS services were restored on Monday evening and DSIT is in contact with AWS to understand how such events can be mitigated in the future.”
He added: “The outage affected a number of suppliers and departments, and it will take some time to fully understand the scale of the impact. DSIT will be gathering a full picture of the impact on government in the coming weeks. DSIT will publish the Government Cyber Action Plan this Winter, which will set out a clear approach for the government and the wider public sector to manage cybersecurity and resilience incidents.”
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Murray was answering one of several recent questions from Labour MP – and chair of the DSIT select committee – Chi Onwurah, who also asked about the proportion of government cloud services are accounted for by each of the three biggest vendors: AWS; Microsoft; and Google.
“The State of Digital Government report estimates up to 60% of the government estate is currently hosted on cloud platforms, mostly using AWS, Microsoft and Google,” the minister said. “More granular data on the split between AWS, Google and Microsoft infrastructure is not currently held. However, the Government Digital Service in DSIT is developing a cloud consumption dashboard to provide government with greater visibility of cloud usage and costs across the public sector.”
A report published earlier this year by the Competition and Markets Authority found that “high levels of market concentration and barriers to entry and expansion have enabled… AWS and Microsoft to hold significant unilateral market power… [and] this harms competition in cloud services in the UK”.
The regulator’s investigation found that, across the infrastructure- and platform-as-a-service markets, the two firms account for as much as 80% of the collective market.
Remedial proposals set out by the CMA include using powers newly provided in last year’s Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act to launch “investigations to consider designating the two largest providers AWS and Microsoft with strategic market status (SMS) in relation to their respective digital activities in cloud services”.
“The new regime will allow the CMA, if it designates one or both of AWS and Microsoft with SMS, to take a targeted and iterative approach to address [its] concerns,” the report said. “We consider that measures aimed at AWS and Microsoft would address market-wide concerns by directly benefitting the majority of UK customers and producing wider indirect effects by altering the competitive conditions for other providers.”
