A few years ago, the author was fortunate enough to personally participate in a remote disaster recovery switching on-site drill of a commercial bank. I remember it was an afternoon. Dozens of people participating in the exercise gathered in a large auditorium and were divided into several groups according to business processes. Bank leaders and technical experts from disaster recovery solution providers were all involved. At two o'clock sharp, the drill officially started. From the detection of faults and the issuance of alarms, to how each business department responds and transfers, to the issuance and execution of system switching commands, to the final startup of the disaster recovery system and the return of business to normal, it is a complete set of processes. Got fully drilled. The atmosphere at the scene was very serious and tense. As a bystander, the author himself did not even dare to breathe.
No one wants to see a disaster or failure occur, let alone cause losses to the economy, corporate reputation, etc. due to untimely or improper handling. But in reality, disasters from nature and attacks inside and outside enterprises are truly everywhere and pervasive. Therefore, for those enterprises that value data security and business continuity, the construction of disaster recovery systems is indispensable. Only by being prepared can they be safe.
Although everyone knows the importance of disaster preparedness, many companies will still hesitate or even retreat when it comes to implementing their own disaster recovery systems. Why? Because disaster preparedness is not just a matter of "pile of money", nor is it just a difficult technical task, but also because it is related to business processes and people, and affects the overall situation. Once a mistake occurs, it will be very difficult. May cause irreversible losses. Therefore, it is not uncommon to build a disaster recovery system but it is useless. When a disaster or failure occurs, it is not uncommon for people to be afraid, unable to switch, or unable to switch.
The reason is that the construction, management, and switching of disaster recovery systems are invisible, uncontrollable, unintelligent, and unautomated, and rely heavily on manpower, which increases uncertainty and the chance of human error. In the past, many companies may have focused on investing in disaster recovery systems, thinking that as long as they had a disaster recovery system, it would come in handy when needed. But in fact, with the disaster recovery system and its ability to play its due role at critical moments, there is still a gap.
what to do? We must work hard on disaster recovery management! With the advancement of technology and changes in customer needs, disaster recovery must also keep pace with the times, from the previous reconstruction to the current emphasis on management, from human monitoring and management to the realization of automation, intelligence and visualization.
Don’t let disaster preparedness become just a decoration
The "14th Five-Year Plan for Software and Information Technology Service Industry Development" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology proposed to enrich security software products and services such as data backup and disaster recovery. As countries, industries and enterprises attach greater importance to data security and business continuity, the disaster recovery industry has also achieved rapid development. Gartner predicts that global disaster recovery market spending will reach US$33 billion in 2023, of which the cloud disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) market will show rapid growth, and the same trend is true in the Chinese market.
From a larger background, due to the drive of digital transformation, disaster recovery, as a key measure to ensure business continuity, will protect the bottom line of enterprise digital transformation; from the perspective of technology and application development, in a hybrid multi-cloud environment, , to deploy applications and data on different clouds and ensure their security and availability, it is necessary to well solve the problem of data backup and recovery in multi-cloud environments, and the introduction of big data and AI also opens up the development and application of disaster recovery. In order to ensure the continuous operation of business 24/7, high availability and real-time performance have become basic requirements, which requires continuous improvement of technical capabilities for disaster recovery. Provide users with faster and more reliable disaster recovery services.
Under the joint influence and influence of comprehensive factors such as digitalization, multi-cloud, big data, and AI, disaster recovery is developing in the direction of automation, intelligence, visualization, high availability, and comprehensive protection. Automated disaster recovery processes and intelligent monitoring and management will further improve the efficiency and reliability of disaster recovery and effectively eliminate users' worries about data and business security.
“+Intelligent” disaster recovery is more controllable
Natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods are the most common causes of business interruption incidents. Do you still remember the typhoon "Dusuri" this summer? Affected by it, heavy rains continued in many places in northern my country. The western region of Beijing suffered severe floods. Not only did water and power outages occur, but some data The center also suffered varying degrees of damage.
If the TV station's program broadcast is interrupted due to natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods, it may have a negative impact on the communication, guidance, influence, and credibility of the media communication platform. The "Radio and Television Safety Broadcasting Management Regulations" have clear requirements: Radio stations, TV stations, and satellite earth stations at or above the provincial level should be equipped with complete and effective disaster recovery systems to ensure the safe broadcast of major programs under special circumstances.
Guangxi Radio and Television New Media has many core systems and generates massive amounts of data every day. Due to the particularity of the media industry, these systems and data have very high requirements for performance and security. Once a natural disaster or logic error, hardware failure, ransomware attack, etc. occurs, leading to a broadcast accident, it will cause irreparable damage to its public image. Although Guangxi is not in a major earthquake zone, it is close to the Yunnan earthquake zone. If a major earthquake occurs in Yunnan, it may trigger aftershocks near Nanning. These are "unexpected" factors that must be considered.
As a provincial TV station, Guangxi Radio and Television New Media should meet the first-level guarantee requirements in accordance with the "Radio and Television Safety Broadcasting Management Regulations". Therefore, Guangxi Radio and Television New Media urgently needs a disaster recovery solution suitable for its new generation system architecture.
With the help of the British side, Guangxi Radio and Television New Media has achieved a "three-step" in disaster recovery construction: First, for the data generated daily by the media center, i2COOPY real-time data replication software is used to migrate the data to Guangxi Radio and Television in real time. cloud to ensure the data consistency between the production end and the disaster recovery end; secondly, through the British "combination punch" of i2Active+i2Availability+i2CDP, disaster recovery and real-time backup of the key businesses of Guangxi Radio and Television New Media have been achieved in seconds. RPO and minute-level RTO indicator requirements; thirdly, use the British i2DRM disaster recovery management platform for unified management of disaster recovery, establish a complete business continuity management system, and through complete resource management, combined with visual process orchestration, Realize electronic management of disaster recovery plans in different scenarios.
As we all know, TV stations have complex systems, including radio and television program production, broadcasting, media operations, advertising, etc. Complex business systems involve many resources, such as various application software, databases, network resources, storage resources, switching script resources, etc. When building a disaster recovery system, unified and effective management of these complex resources is a thorny issue. But for i2DRM it is a piece of cake. In practice, i2DRM can easily integrate various resources involved in the business system into one management, and uniformly schedule all resources during disaster recovery drills and switchovers, ensuring the smooth progress of disaster recovery drills and switchovers.
For the media, their focus is still on ensuring the normal and safe broadcast of programs and content. The traditional disaster recovery system is not transparent in operation, maintenance and management, which is a huge burden for the operation and maintenance personnel of the TV station. One of the important reasons why Guangxi Radio and Television New Media favors i2DRM is that the platform provides visual methods such as command interface and large-screen display, and large-screen display is one of the core functions of the disaster recovery management platform. During the entire process of disaster recovery drill switching execution, management and operation and maintenance personnel can display information on the large screen, grasp the execution progress and status information of all related resources in real time, and make quick decisions at any time through the large screen. Not only that, after each drill is completed, the disaster recovery management platform can automatically generate an execution report, allowing managers to continuously improve previous plans based on the reports, thus greatly improving the intelligent level of disaster recovery management.
Intelligent disaster recovery is a new development requirement for disaster recovery in cloud and big data environments. The intelligentization of disaster recovery is based on traditional storage disaster recovery and scheduled backup, and through a series of technological innovations, it realizes automated takeover and drills of disaster recovery. As a leading company in the domestic disaster recovery industry, Yingfang regards intelligence as a new breakthrough in the evolution of disaster recovery, through full-process command management, resource management, plan management and platform management, combined with the platform's visual disaster recovery process orchestration and National standards for disaster recovery, monitoring the entire emergency switchover and disaster recovery drills in real time, using a decision-level large-screen interface to display disaster recovery related resources, scientifically grasping and promoting the progress of disaster recovery switchover, allowing administrators to command accurately and quickly decision making.
In summary, the i2DRM disaster recovery management platform can calmly deal with emergency situations such as disaster recovery switching or drills through the decision-level large-screen command view function. The overall process is more transparent and controllable than the traditional disaster recovery process, so it is especially suitable for those who are interested in disaster recovery. Customers with high requirements for business continuity, especially in the drills and disaster recovery switchovers of large-scale disaster recovery systems.
Visualization and intelligence of the entire process
On the morning of November 23, 2021, the online banking services of Singapore's DBS Bank, the largest bank in Southeast Asia, experienced a large-scale interruption. After thousands of customers complained, it was interrupted again on November 24, a few hours after the service was restored. In May 2023, a backup power system in the main data center of Zenith Bank, Nigeria's largest bank by market capitalization, caught fire, causing a complete outage of the data center infrastructure. In June 2023, Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) encountered problems with its online and mobile systems, preventing a large number of customers from transferring money.
In order to ensure business continuity and better support business innovation, the financial industry urgently needs to improve the disaster recovery capabilities of data centers, especially to implement disaster recovery switching drills. At present, many domestic commercial banks are actively promoting the construction of the "three major banks" (responsible banks, compliance banks, and smart banks), accelerating digital transformation, and are committed to building smart banks. The intelligence of business certainly requires the support of intelligent disaster recovery.
Facing the industry's strong regulatory requirements and growing data, banks urgently need to establish efficient, compliant, and intelligent disaster recovery plans to ensure zero data loss and business continuity. In practice, because the bank's system architecture is very complex and disaster recovery equipment and resources are scattered, it is very important to manage all resources in a unified manner to ensure the feasibility of recovery. With the continuous change of new generation information technology, especially the rapid development of big data, artificial intelligence and other technologies, banks have also begun to strive for intelligent disaster recovery management, using cloud computing, big data, artificial intelligence and other technical means to achieve better Faster, smarter responses. It is against this background that the i2DRM disaster recovery management platform is entering banks faster and faster.
A complete disaster recovery process usually includes disaster recovery preparation, plan and process management, drill/switchover execution, evaluation report, etc. If you only rely on human power for monitoring and management, it is obviously difficult to cover everything. i2DRM is an intelligent management system covering the entire process of disaster recovery, aiming to make disaster recovery construction, operation and maintenance management, and switching/drilling easier.
i2DRM can realize full-process automation mainly because of its electronic and process-based planning capabilities. Specifically, through the plan management function, it can realize process-oriented and visual task arrangement, conduct unified electronic management of the plan, and perform serial or parallel arrangement based on tasks as units, and form plans according to different scenarios, and finally can Plan to initiate emergency switching or drills. Strong execution management capabilities are also an important reason why i2DRM can realize intelligent disaster recovery management. Through a series of steps such as resource locking, personnel check-in, task execution, execution completion/resource release, etc., i2DRM can initiate switching or rehearsal of the plan that has completed the orchestration design. During the execution of the task, it can also use the process-based scheduling engine to achieve Automatic execution of the entire switching process.
Guiyang Bank has completed the disaster recovery business process guidance for the core business system through i2DRM. When an abnormality occurs in the front-end application system, core application system, database application system, and data warehouse conversion system, it can help customers follow the corresponding disaster recovery business process guidance. Complete relevant disaster recovery switching work and form a disaster recovery report, thereby reducing the probability of risk occurrence and the possible losses caused by disasters.
i2DRM's many innovations in disaster recovery management have further improved the ability of industry customers to deal with various risks, improved the management and use experience of disaster recovery backup, made disaster recovery more intelligent, and achieved business value while ensuring security. maximize. This is the original intention of the British side to build a new generation of disaster recovery management platform.
From disaster recovery to data management
Because it can handle scenarios such as unified management of disaster recovery systems, normalized drills, automatic emergency switching, and large-screen command of disaster switching, i2DRM has had many successful applications in finance and enterprises, and in industries such as government affairs, public security, law enforcement, and transportation. Customers also have urgent needs for visualization and intelligent management of disaster recovery.
Intelligent disaster recovery is a process of continuous evolution and improvement. i2DRM has achieved an important breakthrough in realizing the transition from traditional disaster recovery product interface display to centralized and intelligent large-screen display, making disaster recovery visible and intelligent takeover, and realizing disaster recovery management pre-arrangement and intelligent management, leading the way in disaster recovery. Prepare for future development trends.
It is understood that currently i2DRM still mainly supports the UK's own software products, but its resource center has recently added the Oracle ADG integration function, which can automatically obtain ADG rules, manage and monitor the status of ADG, and support separate ADG or ADG can be switched during the switching process, and ADG start, stop, and switching operations are built-in, eliminating the need to write scripts. In the future, with continued investment in research and development, i2DRM will be more open and support more product access.
Some industry experts pointed out that disaster recovery will further extend to data management in the future. Data is an important asset of an enterprise. Without affecting data security, data can be used for development and testing, disaster recovery drills, data analysis, and even deeper value mining. These are all things that disaster recovery systems need to continuously explore. The British side is also breaking through the "comfort zone" of disaster preparedness and pioneering innovation in the broader data replication industry.
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