Deleted Cloud Shocks Australian Financial Services Industry

One of Australia's largest superannuation (pension) funds UniSuper suffered a rare total cloud failure last week, leaving members locked out of their accounts for the past week.

Google Cloud inadvertently deleted UniSuper’s entire cloud subscription, taking offline every digital access point for members, including: accessing balances, processing investment switches, requesting withdrawals, and using retirement calculators.

Investigations revealed that during the provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud via Google Cloud VMware Engine (GCVE), an obscure parameter was left blank, triggering Google provisioning services to completely delete Uni-Super's entire cloud subscription, and all of its associated systems and services.

UniSuper received no warning, as the deletion was not initiated by the customer but by internal tooling.

Luckily, UniSuper stored backup outside their Google Cloud subscription, which they are using to recover systems.

UniSuper's experience highlights the importance of not relying entirely on a single cloud provider, particularly when it comes to storing backups.

MyDBA recommends storing data backups in either a dedicated backup service, or in a secondary cloud provider.

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