UniSuper's Google Cloud crisis highlights risks

A popular saying states that people are divided into those who make backups and those who will start making them. The story of a company from the United Kingdom shows that even performing backups does not guarantee data safety, at least not with Google.

UniSuper is an Australian pension fund worth approximately CAD $181 billion that manages the assets of 650,000 clients. The Niebezpiecznik service detailed an unusual data loss problem for the company.

According to the available account, UniSuper uses Google Cloud in its operations. Due to Google's services, the company’s data was stored in two geographically separate locations with an additional backup in Google Cloud.

Due to an error that led to the deletion of the Private Cloud subscription, Google simultaneously deleted all data and backups, resulting in UniSuper's two-week battle to regain access to its corporate data. This was only possible thanks to another backup stored with a different provider.

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian summarized this incident: "(...) the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s private cloud subscription."

Interested parties did not disclose what sequence of events was not anticipated by Google's engineers, ultimately leading to the deletion of data and the client's prolonged battle to recover it.