A week of downtime and all the servers were recovered only because the customer had a proper disaster recovery protocol and held backups somewhere else, otherwise Google deleted the backups too

Google cloud ceo says “it won’t happen anymore”, it’s insane that there’s the possibility of “instant delete everything”

    • If you are a small company then yes. But i would argue that for larger companies this doesn’t hold true. If you have 200 employees you’ll need an IT department either way. You need IT expertise either way. So having some people who know how to plan, implement and maintain physical hardware makes sense too.

      There is a breaking point between economics of scale and the added efforts to coordinate between your company and the service provider plus paying that service providers overhead and profits.

      • If coordinating with service providers is hard for a firm, I would argue the cost effective answer isn’t “let’s do all this in house”. Many big finance firms fall in this trap of thinking it’s cheaper to build v buy, and that’s how you get everyone building their own worse versions of everything. Whether your firm is good at the markets or kitchens or travel bookings, thinking you can efficiently in-source tech is a huge fallacy.

        • it is not about it being hard. It simply creates effort to coordinate. And this effort needs to be considered. If you do things externally that means there is two PMs to pay, you need QMs on both sides, you need two legal/contract teams, you need to pay someone in procurement and someone in sales…

          I agree with you that doing software inhouse when there is good options on the market is usually not a good idea. But for infrastructure i don’t see there to be as much of an efficiency loss. Especially as you very much need experts on how to set things up in a cloud environment and you better look carefully at how many resources you need to not overpay huge amounts.

              • Me too as a programmer that uses Google cloud to store government information. Which bit of the policy says they are going to access your data, shouldn’t take you long to link it to me if you read them as much as you say. Unless what you’re actually doing is spreading misinformation and bullshit.

                • I’m not the one who you were responding to, but considering google’s history, I don’t believe anything they claim, because they have lied so many times in the past, and because every “privacy guarantee” they provide is practically unprovable. It’s nothing more than wishful thinking to think that google does nothing with government data stored with them, with google classroom data of millions of children, and others. They have shown that they can’t be trusted.

                  • If they lied about this and are accessing very confidential information I think my company would sue the giblets off Google.

                    You need to remember we are talking about Google Cloud, the enterprise services they offer and not Gmail and search engines.

                  • b2b and audited security standards are a whole different thing - you deal with finance and health you’ve gotta prove to a 3rd party over and over that you have controls and technology in place to make sure you aren’t lying

                    this isn’t consumer BS

                  • This. Even if by some miracle Google isn’t accessing everything on corporate cloud, it is an evil company and the policy can change. It’s a very untrustworthy and unreliable base for a business. And I’m not even talking about the fact that businesses that pay for the cloud are financially supporting Google

    • It’s absolutely not. If you are at any kind of scale whatsoever, your yearly spend will be a minimum of 2x at a cloud provider rather then creating and operating the same system locally including all the employees, contracts, etc.