When addressing a conference on Cybersecurity in Banks organized in Brussels by the World Savings and Retail Banking Institute (WSBI) and the European Savings and Retail Banking Group (ESBG), Alfred Sant said that “discussing Big Data and Cloud is like speaking about an exclusive members’ club”.
He warned that the omnipresence of a number of computer softwares and applications that control the cloud market in the European Union is a cause for concern due to competition, sustainability, stability and security issues. Sant said that despite political and legal actions taken against these tech giants, the widely shared feeling is that neither government nor European Union lawmakers can control their actions.
The conference on Cybersecurity in Banks was organised to discuss the latest digital threats and ways to deal with them including state-of-the-art solutions in malware detections, firewalling, intrusion prevention, fraud detection andincident response. Sant took part in a session on Big Data and Cloud and focused primarily on the regulatory perspective of the issue.
The Labour MEP stressed that dependence on too few providers carries great risks, not just for Big Data and Cloud. He queried: What if one of these clouds disappeared overnight? Would it trigger a fully-fledged economic crisis? Why don’t we go for alternative providers?
“One truly needs to avoid concentration risks and mitigate the dependence on a small group of providers because that could endanger financial stability. A catastrophic failure of a cloud on which rely a swath of banks or credit institutions could cripple not just one entity but a big part of the industry” Sant argued.
Beyond that, he also emphasized that non-European Union tech giants should not be the only masters of cybersecurity knowledge and management in a time when cyberattacks are mushrooming.
Speaking on the Digital Operational Resilience for the Financial Sector (DORA) of which he is rapporteur for the Socialists and Democrats Group in the European Parliament, Sant argued that DORA oblige tech giants providing critical services to have a fully-fledged undertaking set up under European Union company law. This will increase accountability under European Union Law among non-European Union cloud providers. DORA should also lay the ground for inspections on cloud providers over which the European Commission will have the power to mandate instructions, he added.
