Earlier this month, Google Cloud experienced one of its biggest blunders ever when UniSuper, a $135 billion Australian pension fund, had its Google Cloud account wiped out due to some kind of mistake on Google’s end. At the time, UniSuper indicated it had lost everything it had stored with Google, even its backups, and that caused two weeks of downtime for its 647,000 members. There were joint statements from the Google Cloud CEO and UniSuper CEO on the matter, a lot of apologies, and presumably a lot of worried customers who wondered if their retirement fund had disappeared.
UniSuper’s mistake was relying too much on Google Cloud even for critical backups.
I think about how many times things like this happen to individuals that don’t have the weight to warrant an article where their entire collection of online data just gets wiped out and Google responds with: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Don’t trust your data to the cloud, folks.
Don’t trust the Cloud, people.
During the initial deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud for the customer using an internal tool, there was an inadvertent misconfiguration of the GCVE service by Google operators due to leaving a parameter blank. This had the unintended and then unknown consequence of defaulting the customer’s GCVE Private Cloud to a fixed term, with automatic deletion at the end of that period. The incident trigger and the downstream system behavior have both been corrected to ensure that this cannot happen again.
Your data is safe in the cloud with multiple redundant backups, unless your account is marked as delinquent which will be deleted immediately and irrevocably.
