"HyperBDR has exceeded our expectations by meeting both our current compliance and recovery needs, while also aligning with our strategy of deepening technological integration and continuous innovation. Starting with our disaster recovery system, we plan to explore more cloud-native solutions to address increasingly complex challenges in the future."

— J.M., Director of Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery ManagementThe National Social Security Agency

I. Background

In August 2023, a sudden power outage at the data center of a national social security agency caused its business systems to halt for nearly a day, impacting hospitals and medical institutions and threatening the health and social security services of millions of citizens. As one of the largest social security agencies in the region, the organization provides medical, social security, and health management services to millions. The scale and complexity of its operations require high business continuity standards. The power outage revealed the limitations of its local IDC disaster recovery solution in terms of recovery speed and capacity. To minimize service disruptions, enhance disaster recovery capabilities, and ensure regulatory compliance, the agency has decided to migrate its disaster recovery environment from the on-premises Huawei Cloud Stack (HCS) private cloud to the Huawei public cloud.

II. Challenges

1. Compliance Pressure Necessitates Cloud Disaster Recovery Transformation

   As a core hub for healthcare and social security, the agency must meet strict RPO (Recovery Point Objective) and RTO (Recovery Time Objective) compliance requirements. For example, the medical system must ensure the security of Electronic Health Records (EHRs) to protect patient privacy and prevent data loss; as critical social infrastructure, recovery times and data protection are crucial to avoiding public trust issues. This urgency necessitates leveraging public cloud disaster recovery capabilities.

   
   

2. High Disaster Recovery Costs in a Large-Scale, Complex Environment

   The disaster recovery plan involves at least 1000+ virtual machines across a complex environment, including seven versions of Windows hosts and eleven versions of Linux hosts. This scale and diversity drive up both the cost and complexity of traditional disaster recovery solutions. The agency needed to introduce automated deployment and operations management solutions to reduce costs and improve efficiency.

   
   

3. Single Architecture, Struggling to Keep Up with New Challenges and Technological Innovations

   With the agency’s digital transformation and public service innovations, its business needs are constantly evolving. The current private cloud platform struggles to quickly adapt to new scenarios or requirements. For example, it lacks the scalability to meet sudden surges in public service load or new cyber threats, severely limiting business agility and innovation.

III. Solution

1. Precision Protection with Tiered Data Synchronization

   The agency's business systems cover a wide range of domains, and their data consistency requirements vary greatly. To address this, the OnePro team implemented a differentiated incremental synchronization strategy with HyperBDR to ensure each system received the protection level it required:

   • High Business Continuity Systems (e.g., cancer patient management applications, financial systems) use 5-minute incremental synchronization with an RPO of 5 minutes.

   • High Data Consistency Systems (e.g., digital health certificate systems) use 1-hour incremental synchronization with an RPO of 1 hour.

   • Medium Priority Systems (e.g., monitoring and alert systems) use 12-hour incremental synchronization with an RPO of 12 hours.

   • Non-Critical or Non-Real-Time Systems (e.g., public works tracking systems) use 24-hour incremental synchronization or full synchronization on a weekly or monthly basis.

     
     

2. Boot-in-Cloud: One-Click Activation for Faster Recovery

   HyperBDR's Boot in Cloud technology seamlessly integrates with Huawei Cloud APIs, enabling systems to be launched in the cloud following predefined strategies and automated instructions during a disaster. This feature enables multiple business hosts to be quickly started in 10-15 minutes, recovering to the operating system login page and significantly reducing recovery time to meet the agency's RTO of 30 minutes.

   
   

3. Concurrent Data Transfer and Automated Deployment for Enhanced Efficiency

   Considering I/O performance and network bandwidth, the initial full synchronization of 1000+ virtual machines was executed in parallel at a rate of 40-50 machines per day. Furthermore, automated Agent installation scripts were deployed with the agency’s consent to quickly complete the Agent installation for all hosts. The installation of 500 Windows machines was completed in just 2.5 hours, while the 700 Linux systems, due to kernel variations, took slightly longer but were fully deployed within 2 working days, enhancing efficiency and reducing complexity.

   
   

4. Cloud-Native Integration for Cross-Cloud Resilience

   HyperBDR’s deep cloud-native integration enables dynamic resource scheduling and seamless orchestration across cloud environments. This ensures the agency can rapidly adapt to surges in public service load, emerging cyber threats, and regulatory changes, maintaining business continuity. With unified visual management and support for automation scripts, HyperBDR provided an efficient, seamless disaster recovery solution from private cloud to public cloud.

IV. Benefits

By adopting HyperBDR’s cloud disaster recovery solution, the agency successfully implemented a disaster recovery plan from its local data center to the public cloud, minimizing service disruption risks and providing robust protection for healthcare and social security services. Key benefits include:

1. 30-Minute Resilience: Ensuring Business Continuity and Compliance

   Meeting strict SLA requirements, the agency achieved a 30-minute RTO and 5-minute RPO, ensuring core systems recover with minimal data loss and all other systems are restored to the latest valid state within minutes. This not only ensured data consistency but also met high standards for business continuity and data protection.

   
   

2. 80% Cost Savings: Faster Deployment and Lower Disaster Recovery Expenses

   Thanks to the automated Agent installation scripts, the agency no longer needed to manually deploy backup systems for each virtual machine. The disaster recovery deployment cycle was reduced from 15 days to 2 days, saving over 80% in labor costs. Additionally, HyperBDR’s agentless data synchronization and full incremental synchronization technologies helped reduce disaster recovery storage costs by over 70% compared to traditional solutions.

   
   

3. Unlocking the Future-Ready Innovation with Cloud Disaster Recovery Leveraging HyperBDR's cross-cloud protection capabilities, the agency not only strengthened its current business continuity foundation but also positioned itself to lead in digital transformation. By starting with disaster recovery architecture upgrades, the agency is laying the groundwork for future business innovation. Key results include:

   
   

   • Flexible Resource Allocation and On-Demand Scaling

     The disaster recovery architecture ensures that in case of increased public service demand, the system can dynamically adjust resources from the public cloud to meet business needs, ensuring uninterrupted service.

   • Data Management, Analysis, and Smart Transformation

     The agency can efficiently manage and leverage backup data for analysis, incorporating AI and deep learning for business optimization, risk forecasting, healthcare, and social security trend analysis, driving smart healthcare and social security transformation.

V. Conclusion

With cloud-native integration, tiered synchronization, one-click recovery, and automated deployment, HyperBDR has established a resilient cross-cloud protection framework for the agency, significantly enhancing business continuity and future scalability. More importantly, it has paved the way for future digital transformation and innovation. We look forward to collaborating with more public sector organizations to build flexible, reliable, and automated disaster recovery systems that ensure quick service recovery during power outages, natural disasters, and cyberattacks, while enhancing business resilience and data elasticity for digital transformation readiness.

The cover image was AI-generated and does not depict real individuals.