EU designates 19 tech providers as critical infrastructure

The EU’s recent naming of 19 third-party companies as “critical” tech providers was viewed by industry experts in the U.S. in a different light following the disruption caused by the Nov. 18 Cloudflare outage, which came on the heels of an AWS issue in October.

By naming large providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft as critical providers under the EU’s Digital Operational Resilience Act (DORA), the EU formally acknowledged that certain technology companies are essential infrastructure — just like power grids or telecoms.

“It also gives regulators the ability to directly oversee resilience, including governance, incident response, backup integrity, and failover capability,” said Heath Renfrow, co-founder and CISO at Fenix24. “The modern financial system is entirely dependent on a small cluster of cloud, identity, and software providers. A single failure — whether from an outage, cyberattack, or a configuration cascade — can halt payments, trading, claims processing, and core banking services across an entire region.”

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