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Google Cloud Platform has said it will conduct a detailed review of its abuse prevention processes after a customer complained about its treatment.<\/p>\n
The unnamed customer, who works in the renewable energy industry, wrote in a Medium post<\/a> that the company was a few days away from ‘losing everything’ after Google’s automated system pinged it for questionable activity.<\/p>\n Those who get pinged will receive a variety of emails – a ‘barrage’, as the customer put it – detailing that each service is down, the payments account is temporarily closed, and what needs to be done about it. Chat support is switched off, with a warning that unless a picture of the credit card and a government-issued photo ID of the card holder is uploaded within three days, the project will be deleted.<\/p>\n The customer warned about the consequences if the card holder – in this instance, the CFO – was not available, and around the automated nature of the system.<\/p>\n “I understand Google’s need to monitor and prevent suspicious activity. But how you handle things after some suspicious activity is detected matters a lot,” the post explains. “You need a human element here – one that cannot be replaced by any amount of code\/AI. You just can’t turn things off and then ask for an explanation.”<\/p>\n In a statement, posted by Brian Bender, Google Cloud Platform engineering support regional lead, Google said it will be re-evaluating data sources used to assess potential fraudulent activity, implementing additional mechanisms for suspect accounts, and improve how it communicates account warnings. “Protecting our customers and systems are a top priority,” the statement added. “We sincerely apologise for this issue and are working quickly to make things better, not just for this customer but for all GCP customers.”<\/p>\n Given Google’s rise in the cloud infrastructure arena over the past 12 months – the company was listed in the leaders’ section for public cloud IaaS by Gartner in May<\/a> – it is interesting to note that, for this particular customer, this was the first project built by them entirely on Google’s cloud. The customer was previously an AWS house; and while there was no technical reason cited for the change – both are ‘on-par’, as the customer put it – there was a note on the differing customer experiences.<\/p>\n “In our experience AWS handles billing issues in a much more humane way,” the customer explained. “They warn you about suspicious activity and give you time to explain and sort things out. They don’t kick you down the stairs.”<\/p>\n Other issues were sorted. Mike Kahn, Google Cloud customer engineer, noted the importance of having an enterprise user account rather than a consumer one – yet another commenter described this approach as having 'borderline contempt' for customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Google Cloud Platform has said it will conduct a detailed review of its abuse prevention processes after a customer complained about its treatment.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n