Gov't unveils disaster recovery measures for state data centers

Seoul, October 2 (Yonhap) -- In the year following a catastrophic fire at a pivotal state data center, the interior ministry unveiled plans on Friday to bolster the resilience of government information systems. The destructive inferno at the National Information Resources Service (NIRS) data center in Daejeon, which erupted on September 26, 2022, ravaged servers and incapacitated crucial online administrative systems, including government websites and community center platforms nationwide.

The restoration of these services necessitated 95 days. The interior ministry pledged to fortify its disaster recovery framework, ensuring that essential administrative information systems, directly impacting citizens' daily lives, could be reinstated within an hour following a disaster. The government intends to categorize around 15,000 public information systems based on their significance and prioritize the establishment of disaster recovery systems for 13 core systems by the first half of the following year.

Notably, 76 systems designated as the highest A1 level will employ a dual-operation scheme, featuring backup systems housed in separate data centers to guarantee service restoration within an hour in case of a disaster. The government will deploy a real-time replication system for 121 systems at the NIRS' Gongju Center in the first half of the next year, while data replication systems for the agency's Gwangju and Daegu centers will be operational by 2027.

Hwang Gyu-cheol, head of the interior ministry's AI Government Bureau, disclosed these measures during a media briefing.