The U.S. Department of the Treasury in cooperation with the Financial and Banking Information Infrastructure Committee (FBIIC) has published Report on the Financial Services Sector’s Adoption of Cloud Services^[1] (‘Report’). The Report presents the current status of adoption of cloud services in the financial services sector and identifies the following thematic challenges:

• insufficient transparency – scope of information disclosed to financial institutions by Cloud Service Providers (CSPs) – in the context of monitoring the risks associated with the CSPs providing the services and with the audit performed by financial institutions;
• gaps in human capital and tools to securely deploy and monitor the cloud environment;
• exposure to potential operational incidents, including those originating at CSPs;
• potential impact of market concentration in cloud service offerings on the sector’s resilience – the current market is concentrated around a small number of CSPs;
• difficulties encountered by financial institutions in contract negotiations with CSPs.
  This is a challenged faced by both small and big entities in the financial services sector.
• international landscape and regulatory fragmentation.

According to the authors of the Report, failure to address the above-mentioned thematic challenges might reduce the benefits from the deployment of cloud services.

The Report also indicates the long-term objectives of the U.S. Department of the Treasury, i.e. to promote the financial sector’s operational resilience with the use of cloud services.

The Report does not impose on regulated financial institutions any new requirements or standards on cloud adoption.

The Report is available here: https://home.treasury.gov/system/files/136/Treasury-Cloud-Report.pdf

^[1] The Financial Services Sector’s Adoption of Cloud Services, U.S. Department of the Treasury