Nonetheless there is unease about the status quo.
The dominance of a few small companies has come to define much of the tech industry at large – from social media to streaming
And in the cloud sector, some believe this may mean smaller providers can be overlooked or ignored.
Nicky Stewart, senior advisor to the Open Cloud Coalition, has joined lots of other experts in saying Monday’s outage showed “the risks of over-reliance on two dominant cloud providers, an outage most of us will have felt in some way”.
The CMA said in July, external its investigation into competition in the UK cloud services market had found it was “not working well”.
The regulator recommended it use its own recently-acquired powers to investigate whether to designate Amazon and Microsoft as having “strategic market status” – which would allow it to demand changes to boost competition.
Ms Stewart said events like the AWS outage demonstrate the need for “a more open, competitive and interoperable cloud market; one where no single provider can bring so much of our digital world to a standstill”.
“Fair and open competition will enable the UK to diversify its cloud workloads, strengthen our national resilience and allow UK challenger cloud providers to bring their talent and innovation to this over-concentrated and unhealthy market,” she said.
Mr Kelly, meanwhile, said the potential “difficulty” of diversifying cloud providers should not overshadow the urgent need for IT resilience.
Ultimately, he said, the solution was political.
“The UK government should also take the lead in mandating data resilience standards across key industries, including policy frameworks that require the use of two or more distinct cloud providers and promote continuous data replication,” he said.
