16/07/2026
🚨 **THE NEWS: UK regulators are now overseeing major cloud providers**
🔍 **What happened:**
From 13 July 2026, UK financial regulators began overseeing Microsoft, AWS, Google Cloud and Oracle as Critical Third Parties.
The new regime reflects how important their services have become to the financial sector and allows regulators to assess their resilience, identify weaknesses and act where disruption could threaten the wider UK financial system.
**Why it matters for SMEs:**
The decision highlights how dependent businesses have become on a small number of major cloud platforms.
One major outage could disrupt thousands of organisations, but regulatory oversight does not remove a business’s responsibility for managing its own technology risks.
The key point is simple: moving to the cloud does not remove the need for proper resilience planning.
**Here’s what to take from it:**
✅ Major cloud services are now considered critical infrastructure.
✅ Businesses remain responsible for their own continuity and supplier risks.
✅ Backups and recovery plans should not depend entirely on one provider.
**Here’s your practical playbook:**
✅ Identify the cloud services your business cannot operate without.
✅ Review how your data is backed up and recovered.
✅ Check what would happen if Microsoft 365 or another provider became unavailable.
✅ Document alternative ways for staff to communicate and access information.
✅ Test your continuity and recovery plans regularly.
At TWC IT Solutions, we help businesses understand their technology dependencies, strengthen backup and recovery arrangements and prepare practical continuity plans for cloud disruption.
