Dr Hamza Mutaher, Lecturer in Cyber Security at Birmingham City University, warns that the Google Cloud outage highlights the risks of businesses relying on shared cloud infrastructure. Although an outage does not necessarily indicate a data breach, he says organisations should regularly test their ability to maintain essential services when a major technology provider becomes unavailable.
A cybersecurity expert from Birmingham City University (BCU) says there is currently no reason to assume that personal data has been compromised as a result of Google Cloud’s outage.
However, Dr Hamza Mutaher, Lecturer in Cyber Security at BCU, believes the disruption is a wake-up call for businesses and organisations that rely on cloud servers.
The Google Cloud outage has reportedly disrupted services used by banks, businesses and courts.
Dr Mutaher said: “Different businesses can appear independent or separate to one another, whilst still relying on the same cloud infrastructure behind the scenes.
“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.”
