DailyPost 2793
CLOUD RISK
While Covid times saw businesses moving on the Cloud because of lack of choice, it being the only way the customers could be serviced and operations could be maintained. The ease provided by world renowned Cloud companies AWS, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure besides a host of local providers left you with no choice of moving back to your non-cloud based operations. The trend continues to move on to the cloud. The risk and cost need evaluation, for sure. While Cloud seems to provide a near seamless experience with nothing much to bother about, at times technology glitches impact your operations and maybe business credibility too.
It is always better to be aware of the Cloud ecosystem and risk it entails. Today in a large variety of business scenario disruptions happen in operations because of ransomware attacks.Critical infrastructure today is the most attacked sector from the ransomware attack point of view. But there can be other risks too, which you can purely be Cloud risks and it has nothing to do with cyber security. A recent headline blares; Google Cloud accidentally deletes $125 billion Australian pension. Over 500,000 UniSuper members could not access their accounts after Google Cloud accidentally deleted its private cloud account.
UniSuper is a major player in Australia’s superannuation sector. It caters to retirement saving needs for employees in higher education and research fields. How did the outage happen? This outage happened because of a unique misconfiguration on Google Cloud. The outage as expected impacted the university, college and research institution staff. It is said to be a weeklong disruption; out of service we can say for that period. Naturally, it led to widespread frustration and concern. The service restoration commenced from Thursday. It is being told that it would take some time for investment balances to reflect accurate figures.
The ordeal is not over. This is the story of both complex technical glitches and breaches, but the breaches can turn out to be much worse, as the history of ransomware hacks have demonstrated even recently. In this scenario, the consoling news had been the confirmation by the CEO that the incident was neither a cyberattack nor a data breach. “It occurred due to deletion of UniSuper’s subscription, which included its geographical redundancies meant to safeguard against outages and data loss.” Such disruptions are a matter of grave concern to many who rely on technology to secure their data. The severity of the matter forced both UniSuper and Google executives to reach out to affected members to allay their fears.
HOW IS CREATE WORKABLE RESILIENCE IS A BILLION DOLLAR QUESTION IN THE TECH WORLD.
Sanjay Sahay
Have a nice evening.