At the recent 2015 Annual Meeting of the Review Team of Banking Technology Development Prize, ICBC’s,"two-location three-center" project was awarded the 2015 Annual Banking Technology Development Grand Prize for its technology advantage and new business continuity model. According to the requirements of the Review Team meeting, ICBC demonstrated the "two-location three-center" intracity switching on November 5. Representatives from People's Bank of China, enterprises and institutions directly under the People's Bank of China, China UnionPay and policy banks, state-owned large banks, joint-stock commercial banks and other institutions witnessed the whole process of intracity switching and switchback of global business in ICBC data center, and discussed around the theme of "business continuity research and practice under the new industry pattern".

At 9:25 on November 5 in the "two-location three-center" intracity switch demonstration in ICBC Data Center (Shanghai) Jiading Park, the core host system of ICBC and interbank payment system of People's Bank of China completed the transfer from Shanghai Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone to Jiading Park in about 2 minutes after Fan Yifei, Vice Governor of the People's Bank of China, gave the switching instruction. After running at Jiading Park for about 1 hour and 12 minutes, Vice Governor Fan Yifei gave the switchback command at 10:39 and the system successfully switched back to the Waigaoqiao Free Trade Zone. During the switching, all businesses of ICBC group were normal with good transaction responses and system operation.

Gu Shu, President of ICBC, said at the demonstration that the two-location three-center project of ICBC, based on the remote disaster recovery architecture, realized the transformation of information system to the business continuity model with two centers of same city running in parallel. The core system is deployed on two active centers in parallel operation of Shanghai, which allows the minute-level one-button quick transfer of all business and services to the other center in the same city. The "two-location three-center" project also realizes integrated operation and maintenance management of the three centers, which makes the information system layout of ICBC change from handling the small probability disaster recovery to comprehensive handling of various scheduled, unscheduled and emergent failure scenario, realizes qualitative leap in terms of reliability and availability and explores a new mode of continual business operation.

Fan Yifei, Vice Governor of the People's Bank of China, fully recognized ICBC’s achievement in building disaster recovery system and high availability system. He also noted that the "two-location three-center" project not only provides a more secure, stable, efficient information platform, but also represents beneficial attempt and practice to enhance the level of business continuity of the banking industry. All institutions should learn from the successful experience of ICBC and consider their actual situation to establish an effective security system with high availability, follow the "internet +" trend and try to enhance service, improve the service level and capacity and realize the target of 365-day 7 × 24-hour normalized service. Efforts should be made to ensure system security, improve business continuity, and gradually realize the transition from "passive defense" to "active defense", striving to enhance system flexibility, improve the security situation sensing capacity and take preventive measures. In addition, the system construction should be further strengthened and the coordination with regulatory authority, peer institutions and power, telecommunications, firefighting institutions should be improved to enhance the ability of the overall banking sector to cope with risks.