Amidst the increasing frequency of global ransomware attacks, banking institutions have become frequent targets of cyber threats. Over more than two years of innovation and practice, Information2 has partnered with the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China (ICBC) to ensure the security of massive business data, enhancing the bank’s resilience against cyberattacks and data loss while laying a solid foundation for real-time data backup.

As a leading global financial institution, ICBC stores vast amounts of business data from across the world. The bank has stringent requirements for data storage, backup, and archival management. In China, its business data is primarily stored in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhuhai. With data volumes growing exponentially, the bank needed a more secure and stable backup system to facilitate unified and remote data backup. Additionally, to meet compliance audit requirements, it required a flexible and stable backup platform for querying and auditing expired backup sets.

To address the challenges of cross-regional massive data backup and related functional requirements, ICBC selected Information2’s next-generation backup system, i2Backup, as its primary data backup platform. This system offers the following key features:

• Efficient and Intelligent Backup with Enhanced Security: A unified platform for multi-source data backup management, integrating LAN-free backup strategies and deduplication-compression technology for improved efficiency. It also incorporates ransomware protection and NBU policy migration to enable centralized management across multiple storage units and data centers.
• Innovative Backup Set and Policy Management: Supports cascading replication of backup sets and introduces cross-domain cascading replication for the first time. It also features a backup policy version history, recording modifications and enabling queries of expired backup sets for audit purposes.
• High-Performance Archival for Massive Data: Supports D2D2T (Disk-to-Disk-to-Tape) backups with automatic tape migration based on predefined policies. With exceptional D2T (Disk-to-Tape) backup performance, it meets the archival and rapid retrieval demands of industries such as finance, healthcare, and media, handling petabyte-scale data with ease.
• Graphical Configuration Interface: Provides an intuitive and user-friendly graphical interface that simplifies operations and reduces maintenance complexity.

During deployment, ICBC set up multiple data centers in Beijing, Shanghai, and Zhuhai, each running an independent Information2 management platform. These centers formed distinct backup domains, enabling centralized backup task scheduling. The backup platform also supports cascading replication of backup sets, pioneering cross-domain cascading replication within the bank’s infrastructure.

Enhanced Data Security: Replacing the previous backup system improved overall security and stability. The new infrastructure lays a strong foundation for future real-time backup implementations.

More Efficient Operations and Management: A centralized management platform allows backup tasks to be scheduled through a visual interface, significantly improving the efficiency of massive data backup and archival processes.

Functionality Aligned with Business and Compliance Needs: By integrating ICBC’s business and audit requirements, the system enriches administrative capabilities, making historical data more accessible and auditable.

Customer Evaluation

By implementing this next-generation backup system, we successfully replaced our previous setup while resolving numerous existing challenges. Our ability to back up and archive massive amounts of data has significantly improved. Additionally, Information2 has greatly enhanced our response speed in operational maintenance. Data security is a long-term foundation for banking infrastructure, and we will continue to enhance our backup platform to meet new challenges and requirements.