FormalbyteUniSuper Australian pension fund data deleted from Google Cloud
Earlier this month, an unfortunate incident occurred on Google Cloud that affected UniSuper, one of their customers in Australia. The incident was a result of an inadvertent misconfiguration during the deployment of a Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE) Private Cloud. This misstep led to the automatic deletion of the customer's GCVE Private Cloud after a system-assigned one-year period.
Even if you are paying for it, the cloud is just some else's computer. Any data you store there is at their mercy and following malicious intent or an innocent mistakes, you too can become a victim of such incidents.
In response to this incident, Google has taken several measures to prevent such an occurrence in the future. They've deprecated the internal tool that led to the incident and have made the process fully automated and customer-controlled. They've also reviewed all GCVE Private Clouds to ensure no other deployments are at risk and corrected the system behavior that sets GCVE Private Clouds for deletion.
This incident serves as a reminder of the importance of robust data management and the benefits of local on-premise backups. Despite the cloud's many advantages, having local on-premise backups provides an additional layer of security and control, ensuring that your data remains safe and accessible at all times.