Recently, the CloudCDM cloud replica management solution, jointly developed by Information2 and Huawei Cloud, has been successfully deployed at Royal Exchange Insurance (Nigeria) Plc (hereinafter referred to as “Royal Exchange”). This marks the first CloudCDM case for Huawei Cloud in the overseas cloud disaster recovery field.

Royal Exchange, a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Royal Exchange Assurance Plc in London, was officially listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange on December 3, 1990. Through years of dedication and strategic reorganization, Royal Exchange has evolved from Nigeria’s earliest insurance company into a comprehensive insurance group offering general insurance, life insurance, foreign exchange financing, healthcare, and bank loans. As a significant national brand enterprise in Nigeria, Royal Exchange is continuously innovating its products and services through digital technology to build a sustainable future.

01 Security Challenges in Digital Transformation

With the expanding business scope and deepening digital transformation, Royal Exchange faces increasing security challenges such as cyber virus attacks, system scaling and upgrades, operational management vulnerabilities, and natural disasters. Meanwhile, the requirements for Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and Recovery Time Objective (RTO) for business systems and data security are becoming more stringent. Any unplanned business downtime or data damage can result in economic and reputational losses.

Moreover, Royal Exchange’s evolving hybrid IT architecture complicates the storage, backup, and recovery management of structured and unstructured data. Implementing local or remote disaster recovery models to ensure business continuity and data security involves long-term construction issues such as disaster recovery center selection, planning, construction, and link design. Both initial construction and ongoing operation and maintenance costs are high, making it difficult to easily and agilely align with its business development and overall security goals.

02 Agile, Secure, and Sustainable CloudCDM Solution

Cloudification of Royal Exchange’s business systems is a key strategy supporting its digital transformation and security development. Choosing a hybrid architecture with local and Huawei Cloud for cloud-based backup and recovery is the preferred choice for quickly deployable, feature-rich, highly reliable, and cost-effective cloud disaster recovery. This enables important businesses to rapidly migrate to Huawei Cloud while achieving agile management of Huawei Cloud-based backup and recovery, ensuring that CloudCDM can quickly take over in case of local system failures.

Information2 is a leading software enterprise in China for disaster recovery and database replication. Its powerful byte-level replication, database semantic-level replication, and volume block-level replication technologies provide multi-layered, long-distance, and narrow-bandwidth data extraction and replication capabilities for the CDM strategy. Through the first full-quantity + permanent incremental method, Royal Exchange can achieve hot backup targets with a snapshot strategy every minute during data backup migration from the local site to Huawei Cloud. Specific steps include:

First, users utilize the CloudCDM software to transmit business applications from the local data center to the Huawei Cloud data center in Johannesburg through encrypted transmission, enabling data storage backup on Huawei Cloud’s Elastic Volume Service (EVS) hard disks.

Second, to enhance the protection of the CloudCDM software, administrators use Huawei Cloud’s local security group policies to provide a secure operating environment for the entire disaster recovery environment. Information2’s real-time byte-level encrypted replication ensures data transmission security.

Third, when the local production environment fails, Royal Exchange can quickly switch its business to Huawei Cloud through the CloudCDM platform, enabling rapid business takeover. Additionally, leveraging the innovative cloud disaster recovery model and elastic and agile cloud resource advantages, Royal Exchange can perform disaster recovery drills and tests on Huawei Cloud at any time. The entire process does not affect the local production system, and drill reports can be automatically generated, making availability demonstration achievable without excessive resource investment. 

Fourth, if administrators need to adjust and maintain the cloud disaster recovery strategy, they can access the CloudCDM platform through encrypted HTTPS and perform simple operations on its graphical management interface for unified platform maintenance and management.

In this solution, Huawei Cloud, as the cloud infrastructure provider for the CloudCDM solution, provides Royal Exchange with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Technology as a Service (TaaS), and Experience as a Service (XaaS), meeting 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 partners, it ensures Royal Exchange’s future rapid expansion needs in computing, storage, networking, and security.

03 Enabling Customers to Enjoy More Convenient and Secure Disaster Recovery Services

The CloudCDM solution has been deployed and operational on Royal Exchange’s local and Huawei Cloud systems. Its success means that users who have chosen or will choose Huawei Cloud can easily and quickly establish backup and recovery relationships between their local data centers and Huawei Cloud, as well as between Huawei Cloud and other clouds, achieving cloud-based management and protection of important data. Its value includes:

a. Utilizing a hybrid IT architecture to solve the challenge of data backup and disaster recovery from Royal Exchange’s local site to the cloud center, significantly enhancing the overall security of its digital systems.

b. Leveraging CloudCDM’s advantages in data extraction, backup strategies, and drill testing to help Royal Exchange achieve a more agile cloud disaster recovery mechanism, greatly improving the Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) for backup and recovery system construction.

c. 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.

04 User Testimonial

Whether in insurance and financial business or digital infrastructure support and digital service capabilities, Royal Exchange has always invested continuously in innovation. CloudCDM is a backup and recovery solution with strong innovative spirit. Its emergence not only solves the problem of local data backup and rapid recovery but also provides us with new ideas for data value mining and data reuse. Just as our business is increasingly moving towards digitization, in the data era, it is a trustworthy product.