The world’s largest hosted email account provider has experienced a serious technical issue resulting in widespread data loss. Gmail reset around 150,000 user accounts on Sunday preventing user’s access to their data causing serious concern about data security. With Gmail now being heavily used by businesses, and not just home users, this could land businesses in breach of data retention policies which could have financial and legal implications.
Such a serious data breach has forced Google to respond very quickly to the press. In all fairness to Google they have admitted to this being a major fault on their behalf and are working vigorously to try and amend any further consequences. Google are therefore trying to recover all email inboxes and chat logs that were wiped during the data loss.
Google’s statement following the incident read,
“This issue has affected less than 0.08 percent of the Google Mail user base. This is a revised estimate. Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users may be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts,” Google also reported that both they and the affected users have not been amused with the weekend’s events, an obvious remark one would have thought.
The growing importance of email in today’s world is evident and the need to have fast and secure systems is a must. With such pressure being put on email both internally and externally surely companies should better research the options of whether a hosted or onsite solution is best? Whichever direction is taken companies must ensure that they have a secure and reliable online data backup and disaster recovery solution and plan in place.
There are mainly solutions on the market today that can backup and protect all email formats at either the top level or at a granular level. For further information on how Backup Technology can protect email formats please follow this link. http://www.backup-technology.com/online-backup/
