A Cyber Security expert from Birmingham City University (BCU) says it’s unlikely that personal data has been stolen or compromised with Google Cloud’s outage.
But Dr Hamza Mutaher, Lecturer in Cyber Security at BCU, thinks it’s a wake-up call for businesses and organisations who rely on cloud servers.
“Different businesses can appear independent or separate to one another, whilst still relying on the same cloud infrastructure behind the scenes,” said Dr Mutaher.
“A disruption to that shared infrastructure can therefore have widespread knock-on effects, leaving customers unable to access otherwise unrelated services, especially when it involves a company like Google that is used by tens of thousands of organisations.
“But this may be more of an inconvenience than a risk for users. An outage does not, by itself, mean that personal data has been stolen or compromised.
“The reported network failures point to an availability problem, rather than proof of a data breach, although the full cause and implications still need to be established.
“This is the time for organisations to understand what technology and digital systems they are dependent on. This can be done through regular testing to see how essential services would continue operating if a key provider became unavailable.”
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