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UniSuper, an Australian company that manages over $125 billion worth of retirement funds for 674,000 people suffered a devastating loss of its data on Google Cloud.

This caused downtime between 2 May to 15 May, as Google Cloud had accidentally deleted UniSuper’s public cloud account. Although the retirement fund company had duplication in two Google Cloud geographical locations as protection against outages and loss, these were also deleted!

Nevertheless, to their credit UniSuper also had backup with another service provider.

What are the lessons learnt?

1) Hire A Cloud Architect
If your company relies on technology so much that failure / downtime will affect your company’s ability to run or provide products or services to clients, then you should hire a cloud architect. Many companies use cloud engineers, devops engineer, network engineer or some other IT professional and skip the planning stage that should be handled by a cloud architect for such a project.

2) Backup
A good rule for business continuity is this – if you cannot afford to lose it, back it up. You can also create local backup and store it securely.

3) Use Multi Cloud Solution
Create redundancies with different vendors. As Mike Gibbs would say, one vendor is a single point of failure.

UniSuper’s implementation of a multi cloud strategy proved to be a life saver that might have spared them from lawsuits and possible bankruptcy.

Conclusion

My team includes experienced enterprise & cloud architects with up to 25years individual experience who meet with clients to understand their business requirements and aims. Traditionally, tech people are trained to solve technology problems and not understand business needs.

Over 50%-70% of technology projects fail. Organisations are spending huge parts of their budget on technology that do not meet business goals, and literally do nothing.

Your existing or planned technology should optimise your teams, processes, and help you earn more.

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