"a major Australian financial institution", "the VMs cannot be recovered"
Well as far as I'm concerned, that test was quite successful and the conclusions are obvious : do not trust the cloud. Not if you're a financial institution with an obligation of 100% accuracy in managing your customers' accounts.
The cloud is still about as solid as its name. It must be great fun spinning up VMs and chucking all that load balancing in an environment that one does not have to manage, but it's a lot less fun being advised that all your data is lost and cannot be recovered.
Companies will go down because of this.