Capital One said its expects the incremental costs of the incident to be $100 million to $150 million, mostly expenses tied to providing credit monitoring and legal support. The company has a cyber-risk insurance policy with a $10 million deductible for $400 million in coverage.

“This type of vulnerability is not specific to the cloud,” Capital One said in a statement. “The speed with which we were able to diagnose and fix this vulnerability, and determine its impact, was enabled by our cloud operating model.”

Cloud Push

While banks including JPMorgan and Discover Financial Services have been vocal proponents of cloud technology and its ability to lower costs and speed up digital advancements, industry executives have cautioned that sensitive consumer data could be put at risk on the cloud. Bank of America Corp., the second-largest U.S. bank, has been reticent to use the public cloud.

Amazon Web Services is making an aggressive push for growth in the financial industry and is already working with firms including HSBC Holdings Plc, Fidelity Investments, Nasdaq Inc. and Liberty Mutual Group Inc.

“We’re all in on the cloud right now,” Steve Randich, chief information officer at the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, the U.S. brokerage industry’s main regulator, said at a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services earlier this month at New York’s Javits Center. Virtually all of the regulator’s applications and data are in the public cloud, and its net costs have decreased as a result, he said.

Over the years, Capital One has become something of a poster child for Amazon’s push into financial services for its cloud business. The lender was among the first to publicly acknowledge a partnership with Amazon, and it was the subject of several case studies that Amazon published on how its technology can improve banks’ offerings.

“Capital One selected AWS for its security model,” according to an Amazon Web Services website. “It is using or experimenting with nearly every AWS service to develop, test, build and run its most critical workloads, including its new flagship mobile-banking application.”

Tech Changes

Capital One is often considered a leader in banking technology, a history that goes back to its founding by Fairbank in 1988. In recent years, the company has undergone what it calls a “technology transformation” in which it hired thousands of engineers and developed its application programming interface, or API, to share data more easily.