Recently, the Australian UniSuper fund experienced an outage that left half a million of their clients without access to their investment accounts for a week. This was due to the deletion of their private cloud account by Google. Despite managing $125 billion in investment capital, the blame fell on Google for the mishap. According to a joint statement by both companies, this was an isolated incident that had never occurred before with any of Google Cloud’s customers globally.
The outage was caused by a misconfiguration during the provisioning of the UniSuper private cloud services, resulting in the deletion of the cloud subscription. The company had backups in different geographical locations to protect against interruptions and losses, but unfortunately, the deletion affected data in both locations. Restoration required significant effort and partnership between UniSuper and Google Cloud, but they were able to recover most of the core systems.
Moving data to cloud software providers is becoming increasingly common for companies and governments, despite the risks of failures and interruptions. Google Cloud competes with other major providers like Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure. Although the incident was a first of its kind for Google, it highlights the importance of having backup systems and redundancy in place to prevent significant data loss.
In a world where organizations are relying more on cloud solutions for storage and other services, ensuring the security and integrity of data is crucial. The recent incident with UniSuper serves as a reminder of the potential risks associated with cloud computing and the need for robust backup and recovery measures. As such, organizations should take proactive steps to minimize these risks while still reaping the benefits that come with using cloud solutions.
