Amazon’s new contract to host top-secret intelligence for UK spy agencies must be scrutinised by parliament to ensure risks over data access, privacy, and sovereignty are being mitigated, cyber security experts have warned.
The deal between GCHQ, MI5 and MI6 and AWS, Amazon’s cloud arm — estimated to be worth £500m to £1bn over a decade — was revealed by the Financial Times earlier this week. Just as news of the contract became public, parliament’s intelligence and security committee announced it was embarking on an inquiry into cloud technologies.
The committee has declined to comment on the remit of its investigation or what has prompted the probe.
Conor McGinn, Labour’s shadow security minister, said it was “only right” that the ISC should scrutinise the deal, given the sensitivities involved in a US tech company being contracted to host classified UK data.
“There are key issues that are causing concern, such as what security arrangements have been put in place given the deal is with a non-British company, and how such a large deal with one supplier will impact on the UK’s cyber resilience,” he said, adding that ministers should be more…
