Store Your Data on the Cloud They Said

It would be "safe" with the professionals looking after it. Or maybe not. From Ars Technica: “Unprecedented” Google Cloud event wipes out customer account and its backups

Buried under the news from Google I/O this week is one of Google Cloud's biggest blunders ever: Google's Amazon Web Services competitor accidentally deleted a giant customer account for no reason. UniSuper, an Australian pension fund that manages $135 billion worth of funds and has 647,000 members, had its entire account wiped out at Google Cloud, including all its backups that were stored on the service. UniSuper thankfully had some backups with a different provider and was able to recover its data, but according to UniSuper's incident log, downtime started May 2, and a full restoration of services didn't happen until May 15.

Ars Technica goes on to call this "the stuff of nightmares" for administrators.

It was a series of events culminating in an "inadvertent misconfiguration" that deleted everything. If you UniSuper had believed Google's advertising they would have been in bad shape. In fact the technical term for what happened is FUBAR. Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition.

So. Does your bank, retirement account, business, rely on Google? Should you?

I'm almost ready to go back to paper statements.

As the image says. "The Cloud" is just someone else's computers. You are paying them to manage it. How good a job are they doing? Do you have any way to assess their expertise, or are you just going by reputation?

Shoutout to the hero at UniSuper who chose a multi-cloud solution.

UniSuper is a big firm that manages Australia's equivalent of 401(K)s. (Hat tip to Nobody Asked Me…)