A monumental error by Google Cloud has resulted in the entire account of Australian superannuation fund UniSuper, worth $135 billion, including its backups. UniSuper has 647,000 customers.
No doubt it’s the media hype around the Google I/O conference, or other tech news of the week, such as the blocking of Tik Tok in New Caledonia, the fact remains that Google would have done well without the nightmare he has just gone through.
A ” unprecedented event » at Google Cloud led to the total and irreversible deletion of UniSuper’s $135 billion Australian cloud account, as well as its entire backups hosted on the service. A real potential disaster that could only be avoided thanks to external backups of the fund with another cloud provider. The almost 647,000 clients of this retirement fund must have been close to heart failure.
Google Cloud, Google’s failing cloud showcase
Google Cloud is Google’s cloud platform that competes directly with Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. Offering data hosting services, on-demand computing, artificial intelligence and much more, Google Cloud has attracted many large companies wishing to offload their aging technological infrastructures. It is in this wave that the UniSuper retirement fund, which manages no less than $135 billion in assets, began an ambitious migration to Google Cloud in 2023, touting the “ extreme simplicity and efficiency » of this decision.
But a year later, that gamble has turned into an absolute nightmare for UniSuper. In what its CEO Peter Chun described as “ unprecedented event “, Google Cloud simply deleted the entire UniSuper cloud account as well as the associated backups, following a ” bad configuration » of their services. A blunder of such magnitude that even the big boss of Google Cloud, Thomas Kurian, had to present an official apology, admitting that it was a “ isolated case ” Who ” should not have happened “.
How to avoid losing all your data in the cloud
Faced with such a fiasco, the question that burns on our lips is: how could such a catastrophe occur? The answer seems to lie in the excessive centralization of UniSuper’s backups with a single cloud provider. Indeed, if Google Cloud deleted the main account, the backup backups hosted on the same platform logically suffered the same fate. A design error with potentially devastating consequences for all UniSuper data and operations.
The lesson is clear: never rely on a single backup system, no matter how reputable it may be. The best practice is a multi-cloud approach where critical data is replicated across separate, independent cloud platforms. A tedious and time-consuming method, certainly, but one which allows you to avoid total loss in the event of a major failure of a specific supplier. UniSuper had precisely opted for this wise path, which allowed it to avoid the worst and finally recover all of its data from another cloud player two weeks after the initial incident.
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Source : Ars Technica
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