The Australian company was thrown into turmoil when its account was suddenly deleted with all data, including backups. Google Cloud blames me.

On May 2, UniSuper, an Australian pension fund, reported that its services were interrupted due to an issue with an external service provider. It quickly became clear that this was not a cyberattack, but a painful mistake by Google Cloud. CEO Thomas Kurian had to apologize for the error in a joint statement on UniSuper’s website.

“Unprecedented series of events”

What exactly went wrong? Kurian blamed the incident on an “unprecedented series of events.” A misconfiguration in the provision of private cloud services resulted in the complete removal of UniSuper’s cloud subscription.

As a result, all of the customer’s data was deleted in one fell swoop, including all backups that had previously been stored on Google Cloud. Google emphasizes that this is an isolated, unprecedented incident and that measures are being taken to ensure it does not happen again.

But it took another two weeks before UniSuper managed to fully recover. However, the Australian company had taken good precautions and duplicated its data in two regions. This gives you an advantage if a region goes offline, but you’re still powerless if your provider accidentally deletes your account.

Create backups

Fortunately, the Australian company had carefully read the rules for a successful backup strategy and also had backups with other service providers. This allowed the company to limit the damage and speed up the recovery of data to Google Cloud. Let this be the most important lesson your company can learn from this incident.