SAINS - Alibaba Cloud

Technology

Malaysia

Enterprise/Public Sector

"Our customers have high expectations of us in terms of application service reliability and service restoration times. Thus, we have decided to implement private cloud-based platforms with automatic disaster recovery capabilities from Alibaba Cloud to ensure we can quickly deliver peace of mind and security whilst also meeting the data sovereignty policy of our key customers."

Busiai Seman

Chief Executive Officer, SAINS

About SAINS

Sarawak Information Systems (SAINS) is a leading Malaysia-based ICT system integrator and solutions provider. As a company wholly owned by the Sarawak State Government, SAINS has a long track record of successfully delivering business solutions and end-to-end ICT services for its customers, empowering the growth of the Sarawak region through innovation as it does so.

Founded in 1991 with the aim of modernizing the Sarawak Government computing and technology infrastructure, SAINS is committed to helping customers achieve their goals through the development of digital solutions and the provision of first-rate services through the development of digital solutions and the provision of first-rate services.

Challenge

As a business wholly owned by the local government, SAINS is held to an incredibly high standard by customers who rely on its systems. Its success and resilience are an important part of how people view both SAINS and the Sarawak State Government, as trust in the company is tied to trust in local institutions.

Hundreds of applications presented a substantial challenge to achieving disaster resilience and fully recovering services within the desired Recovery Time Objective (RTO). This sheer volume of applications and systems made restoring services highly challenging, highlighting the difficulties faced in managing such a large and complex infrastructure during a disaster scenario.

Why Alibaba Cloud

It was essential for SAINS' new cloud partner to provide disaster recovery services and protocols to ensure continuous operability in extreme scenarios. Alibaba Cloud's Apsara Stack platform met SAINS' requirements by offering out-of-the-box, cloud-native solutions with integrated platform-level disaster recovery (DR) capabilities. These tools ensured security, resilience, and peace of mind by maintaining infrastructure operability both day-to-day and during critical disasters.

Alibaba Cloud's cloud-platform-level DR failover solution significantly enhanced the speed and reliability of disaster recovery. Additionally, the multi-purpose cloud platform's multi-tenant capability allowed SAINS to use the DR failover as either an end-user or a cloud service provider for greater flexibility.

SAINS also needed support for a wide-ranging digital transformation, and Alibaba Cloud's cloud-native Apsara Stack was ideal for modernizing its application architecture into cloud-native microservices. The various digital services available would reduce the time-to-market for new offerings, and make sure they launched with increased resilience.

Architecture

To meet the disaster resilience requirements of the Sarawak Government, SAINS turned to Alibaba Cloud’s robust Apsara Stack - the full-stack cloud infrastructure and platform solution developed using years of developing hyper-converged infrastructure and disaster recovery best practices on the Alibaba Cloud public cloud.

Dual availability zones architecture was selected for deployment to ensure SAINS’ business continuity and stability in an emergency scenario. Applications can run on active-active mode across both AZ while the database can run on active-passive mode. This architecture provides high availability to the business.

SAINS could then initiate a broader digital transformation of its infrastructure with the help of Alibaba Cloud’s out-of-the-box cloud-native solutions. Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) allowed for on-demand and quick provisioning of virtualized hardware infrastructure resources, offering control and flexibility to SAINS over its infrastructure. PaaS ensured the on-demand and quick provisioning of cloud-native database for SAINS’ applications, software and data. Finally Security as a Service (SaaS) solutions provided fully managed security solutions to safeguard SAINS’ application security, data security, infrastructure security, and account security.

Crucially, Alibaba Cloud’s cloud platform level Disaster Recovery failover feature allowed SAINS to quickly and easily switch to secondary AZ in a disaster scenario, covering all infrastructure elements.

Key Results

Alibaba Cloud’s proven Aspara technology allowed SAINS to build secure, disaster resilient, and future proof digital infrastructure for the Sarawak Government. The cloud-platform-level DR failover solution in particular ensured much greater resilience for SAINS and its clients, reducing the time needed to recover from disaster scenarios.

More broadly, the multi-purpose cloud platform with multi-tenant capability greatly expands SAINS’ own offering to its customers when it offers cloud services as a cloud service provider. This future-proofing of SAINS’ core capacity had the added bonus of deepening market and industry trust with Alibaba Cloud.

Looking Forward

Recently SAINS has explored expanding its collaboration with Alibaba Cloud, enhancing its digital public services and sustainable practices through a combination of innovative cloud and Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions.

Integrating Alibaba Cloud’s range of AI technologies allows SAINS to streamline operations, improve service delivery, and promote user-centric efficiency. This is paired with its use of AI sustainability solutions, which will measure the carbon footprint of SAINS’ activity. These tools will also assist with implementing carbon reduction strategies, and enhancing energy management within the government infrastructure.

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