The Cost of Downtime: UK Exposure to Cloud Infrastructure Failure

By examining thousands of UK businesses of all sizes and industries, Parametrix and the Cyber Monitoring Centre (CMC) joint analysis maps out the cloud infrastructure supporting critical business operations, identifies the cloud regions where economic exposure is concentrated, and quantifies the potential financial impact of major cloud outages. It also examines cloud dependency by company size, industry, cloud service provider, geographic region, and redundancy strategy, providing an unprecedented view of how digital infrastructure supports the UK economy.

Key findings from the report include

• More than 80% of FTSE 100 and more than 60% of all UK organisations are cloud dependent
• A 24-hour outage of AWS eu-west-1 could generate an estimated £1B in losses (excluding downstream impacts)
• Cloud risk is concentrated in a few cloud regions: Half of FTSE 100 companies are dependent on UK/Ireland cloud regions, while the other half have exposure to regions outside the UK
• Cloud risk is concentrated in a few cloud providers: Around 80% of all UK organisations are dependent on AWS, Azure and GCP
• Critical sectors are highly exposed to the cloud. Dependency is highest in Health (91%), Transportation (76%) and Finance (76%)

For more information, download the full report today.