Royal Exchange, a leading integrated insurance group in Nigeria, faced security challenges during business expansion and digital transformation. In collaboration with Information2 and Huawei Cloud, Royal Exchange successfully implemented a cloud disaster recovery solution based on a hybrid IT architecture, effectively enhancing data security and business continuity, and achieving an efficient and resilient cloud-based disaster recovery mechanism.
Customer Challenges
Royal Exchange, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Royal Exchange Assurance Company, has evolved from Nigeria’s earliest insurance company into a comprehensive insurance group integrating general insurance, life insurance, foreign exchange finance, healthcare, and bank loans since its listing on the Nigerian Stock Exchange on December 3, 1990. As a national brand enterprise in Nigeria, Royal Exchange is actively leveraging digital technology to drive continuous innovation in products and services, aiming to build a sustainable corporate image.
With the continuous expansion of its business scope and deepening digital transformation, Royal Exchange faces increasingly severe security challenges, including network virus attacks, system scaling and upgrades, operational management vulnerabilities, and natural disasters. Meanwhile, the recovery point objective (RPO) and recovery time objective (RTO) requirements for business systems and data security are becoming increasingly stringent. Any unplanned business downtime or data damage could result in severe economic losses and reputational harm to Royal Exchange.
Furthermore, the evolving hybrid IT architecture of Royal Exchange complicates the storage, backup, and recovery management of structured and unstructured data. Adopting local or remote disaster recovery models to ensure business continuity and data security would involve long-term construction issues such as site selection, planning, construction, and link design for disaster recovery centers, along with high upfront construction and ongoing maintenance costs, making it difficult to match the rapid business development and overall security goals.
I2 Solution
Addressing Royal Exchange’s needs, Information2 provided a cloud disaster recovery solution based on a hybrid architecture combining local and Huawei Cloud resources. The solution utilizes CloudCDM software to enable rapid backup and recovery of local data to Huawei Cloud, supporting rapid migration of critical businesses to the cloud while featuring high reliability, cost-effectiveness, and agile management.
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Data Backup and Migration: Users utilize CloudCDM software to transmit business application data from the local data center to Huawei Cloud’s Johannesburg data center in an encrypted manner, achieving data storage backup on Huawei Cloud EVS disks. Through an initial full backup followed by permanent incremental backups, a snapshot policy with a one-minute interval ensures hot backups of data.
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Secure Operating Environment: To enhance the security of CloudCDM software, administrators use Huawei Cloud’s local security group policies to provide a secure operating environment for the entire disaster recovery setup. Meanwhile, Information2 employs real-time byte-level encrypted replication technology to ensure data security during transmission.
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Rapid Business Takeover: When the local production environment fails, Royal Exchange can quickly switch business operations to Huawei Cloud through the CloudCDM platform, enabling rapid business takeover. Leveraging the disaster recovery model on the cloud and the advantages of elastic and agile cloud resources, Royal Exchange can easily conduct disaster recovery drills and tests on Huawei Cloud without affecting the local production system. Drill reports can be automatically generated, reducing the need for excessive resource investment in availability validation.
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Unified Maintenance and Management: Administrators can access the CloudCDM platform via encrypted HTTPS and perform easy operations on its graphical management interface for unified maintenance and management of the platform. This greatly facilitates the adjustment and maintenance of cloud-based disaster recovery strategies.
As the cloud infrastructure provider for the CloudCDM solution, Huawei Cloud provides Royal Exchange with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Technology as a Service (TaaS), and Experience as a Service (EaaS). This meets the solution’s requirements for low-latency network transmission and high-stability computing power. Meanwhile, leveraging Huawei Cloud’s capabilities in system integration, software, hardware, and service partnerships ensures Royal Exchange’s rapid future expansion needs in computing, storage, networking, and security.
Solution Effects
1. Adopting a hybrid IT architecture addresses Royal Exchange’s challenges with data backup and disaster recovery from local to cloud centers, significantly enhancing the overall security of its digital systems.
2. Through CloudCDM’s advantages in data extraction, backup strategies, and drill testing, Royal Exchange achieves a more agile cloud-based disaster recovery mechanism, greatly improving the total cost of ownership (TCO) for backup and recovery system construction.
3. Compared to locally deployed CDM appliances, CloudCDM leverages Huawei Cloud’s elastic cloud infrastructure resources and CloudCDM’s replica management capabilities for massive data, enabling Royal Exchange to easily achieve elastic scaling of disaster recovery resources and ensuring the security of more systems and data in the future.
Customer Evaluation
The hybrid IT cloud disaster recovery solution implemented by Information2 and Huawei Cloud significantly enhances data security and business continuity, reduces TCO, achieves efficient and resilient cloud-based disaster recovery, and provides solid support for future business expansion. Royal Exchange is very satisfied with the cooperation results.
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