In recent years, with the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic and Russo-Ukrainian War, the economic growth has been severely disrupted, and the global political and economic situation has become increasingly uncertain. Taiwan, in particular, faces high geopolitical risks.
To respond to the wave of the uncertain economic situation and digitalization in the financial sector, CTBC Bank ("CTBC") built its private cloud based on the VMware Cloud Foundation (VCF) multi-cloud platform years ago as the first step. Then in early June, CTBC successfully validated the implementation of VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery (VCDR) architecture as the first financial institution in Taiwan to do so during the bank's information system disaster recovery drill. During the validation, the system switchover time was estimated to be reduced by 80%.
With the continuous relaxation of supervision regulations, CTBC will gradually integrate VCDR into its Business Continuity Planning to enhance the resilience and flexibility of its information services. With VCDR, CTBC aims to ensure the uninterrupted provision of stable and secure financial services to consumers throughout the year, making it one of its key strategic advantages for sustainability.
The VCDR architecture, as validated by CTBC, demonstrates greater advantages such as flexibility, agility, and rapid response. By utilizing the disaster recovery storage space in the public cloud, such as VMware Cloud on AWS (VMC on AWS), CTBC meets the disaster recovery needs of different types of information systems with the data lifecycle, snapshot retention times, resource utilization, and disaster recovery procedures defined by service level agreements (SLAs).
As it extends its own data center to the public cloud, CTBC can migrate applications without changing their IP addresses through the HCX Network Extension mechanism. VCDR can flexibly scale up or down according to business needs. In the event of unexpected emergencies or annual disaster recovery drills, CTBC can activate the cloud disaster recovery environment according to the automated VCDR Disaster Recovery Plan (DRP).
Titan Chia, Chief Technology Officer of CTBC Holding, states: "Promoting cloud adoption in the financial sector to accelerate digital transformation is an important strategy for CTBC to build a digital bank and establish a new information collaboration ecosystem. By following regulations and ensuring information security, we conducted technology validation based on multi-business scenarios, aiming to drive digital transformation in technology, process, and talent. This helps accumulate the necessary technological capabilities for the next wave of digital transformation. With financial services optimized by cloud technology, we will become the first-mover to provide innovative and stable financial services to our customers."
Josie Tu, Division Head of the Information Service Division at CTBC, states: "CTBC continuously promotes the modernization of financial services by integrating cutting-edge technology with financial services to meet emerging digital service demands. From adopting the software-defined data center to building enterprise private clouds and accelerating application modernization, we continuously optimize system resource efficiency, agility, flexibility, security, and stability by leveraging innovative technologies to maximize IT value. The validation of the successful implementation of VCDR architecture not only marks an important milestone in our hybrid cloud journey but also fulfills CTBC's commitment to pursuing innovation breakthroughs and makes information services a key capability for enhancing business resilience."
Barry Chen, VMware's global vice president and president of Greater China, states: "Businesses need to maintain a sense of security and be prepared to respond to uncertainties in order to maintain business resilience in such an environment. CTBC's validation of the successful implementation of VCDR architecture not only makes us the first financial institution in Taiwan to do so but also sets a good example for the modernization of Taiwan's financial industry to both meet digital financial demands and maintain sustainability."
Validation of the successful implementation of VCDR is an important milestone in CTBC's ongoing efforts to enhance digital financial business resilience. VCDR showcases the following four benefits:
1. Increased flexibility in selecting disaster recovery center locations, reducing the complexity of system operations
Since VCDR operates in a multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environment, CTBC can choose disaster recovery data center locations from local sites in Taiwan to global public cloud data centers based on their needs. In the event of a large-scale unexpected disaster in Taiwan, the disaster recovery data center located outside Taiwan can continue to operate without being affected. Additionally, traditional disaster recovery operations involve complex hardware integration, maintenance of infrastructure, and communication with important vendors, which requires manpower investment. With the implementation of VCDR, CTBC can delegate the complex operational tasks to cloud vendors, while focusing on service quality control. This makes the cloud disaster recovery process more flexible, agile, and responsive.
2. Reduced overall cost of building cloud disaster recovery architecture
VMware's VCDR solution utilizes public cloud as the storage environment for disaster recovery data. It can flexibly and adaptively meet CTBC's business needs with a "pay-as-you-go" model. For example, when backup is not enabled, CTBC only needs to pay for storage space and minimal computing resources, thereby reducing the costs associated with building a disaster recovery data center, such as facility rental, hardware and software procurement costs, and saving operation manpower.
3. Significantly improved Recovery Time Objective (RTO)
During the validation in early June, CTBC assessed that system switchover time during disaster recovery could be reduced by 80%, achieving the bank's objective of recovery in minutes. The public cloud resources in VCDR are standardized and adopt the same software-defined architecture as the on-premises enterprise private cloud. All processes can be completed and validated synchronously through automation, significantly reducing the business interruption caused by disaster recovery system switchover.
4. Enhanced granularity in system recovery, covering more disaster recovery scenarios to improve efficiency
Unlike traditional disaster recovery methods that require switching the entire data center or system, VCDR solution allows for recovery at a more granular level, such as individual hosts, data directories, or data files. This reduces the time required for CTBC's system and data recovery. In the event of a sudden situation causing damage to a portion of the primary data center system or data, the required systems or data can be restored in the shortest possible time, maximizing the benefits of system disaster recovery construction.
With the strategy of "Customer-centric Digital Transformation", CTBC uses VMware VCF, VCDR and other multi-cloud platforms to create a flexible and efficient environment that can be seamlessly migrated. Such environment is built to meet the needs of modern digital finance, and to continue to enhance the sustainability of financial business and the resilience of digital finance.