Google Cloud Accidentally Deletes UniSuper’s $135 Billion Pension Account
An incident that then take two weeks to recover from...
Google Cloud has deleted in error the $135 billion account and data for UniSuper, a retirement fund company that holds the superannuation savings for 647,000 members working at 37 Australian universities. Member funds and accounts were inaccessible for two weeks from May 2 to 15 while Google worked to recover and restore everything.
According to a Google Cloud spokesperson, the incident resulted from an accidental misconfiguration during provisioning, which canceled UniSuper’s private cloud subscription. Google Cloud has assured its customers that steps have been taken to ensure such a disruption does not occur again.
As a leading Australian superannuation fund, especially for employees in the higher education and research industries. The services provided by UniSuper are similar to those of the American 401(k). The fund migrated to Google Cloud in 2023 to streamline its processes. However, the deletions of data across geographies meant that the recovery process lasted for two weeks.
The incident highlights the risks of cloud-based operations and raises the importance of maintaining backups. A multi-cloud solution has been recommended to mitigate similar instances, which can impact even the most prominent and trusted companies in the tech sector.
As we know, cloud providers are an alternative to company's hosting their own servers and storage for applications and data. Major providers include Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, who suggest lower IT costs as one of the driving reasons to migrate to them, but we always advise customers to consider all their options - especially a robust data protection strategy should the worse happen.
We hear Commvault was a critical part of enabling the fund to return to full operation...
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