Higo Bank boosts resilience with sub-two-hour recovery on Azure VMware Solution

IT disaster recovery becomes critically important in earthquake-prone Kumamoto

Emerging from the 135th National Bank established in 1879, Higo Bank opened in 1925 as Higo Cooperative Bank and adopted its current trading name three years later. According to a 2025 Teikoku Databank survey, the bank—which is headquartered in Kumamoto City—is the main bank for over 58% of businesses in its prefecture. In April 2024, its parent group, Kyushu Financial, launched its Fourth Medium-Term Business Plan. Themed on “leaping forward,” the plan promotes initiatives that will empower the Group to co-create regional value.

As Higo Bank builds a solid business platform that will significantly assist growth of the economy of Kyushu, it has also set a notable goal in IT: to always adopt advanced technology early. For example, the organization introduced Microsoft 365 in 2011 when the service had recently launched as Office 365. It also adopted Azure the year after the East and West Japan regions of Azure opened in 2014.

Higo Bank began virtualizing its system infrastructure comparatively early. In 2001, it introduced server-based computing technology Windows Terminal Services (now Remote Desktop Services) to minimize the rising expense of buying and upgrading software for thick clients.

“We virtualized our desktops to prevent information leaks and improve productivity,” says Hiromasa Takeshita, Head of Higo Bank’s Digital Platform Development Group. The bank updated its virtualization software over time and released its third-generation VMware Horizon (Omnissa Horizon)-based system in March 2024.

At the time, Takeshita debated the best way to implement disaster countermeasures for IT systems in its on-premises virtual environment. Kumamoto Prefecture has experienced many serious earthquakes, including a series of earthquakes in 2016 that produced two magnitude-7 tremors. Higo Bank’s administrative center, which had stood since 1985, suffered severe damage.

“We were backing up our IT data on tapes and sending them to a remote location, but if our data center had failed, recovery would've been impossible, even with that data," says Takayuki Tominaga, Deputy Chief of Research of the Digital Platform Development Group. As the bank had been operating a two-center system for its accounting system since 2019, disaster recovery for IT systems became a focus of attention again.

Building cost-effective disaster recovery site with Azure VMware Solution

In February 2024, Higo Bank began considering a solution. With formulation of the aforementioned Fourth Medium-Term Business Plan already underway, discussions included IT system disaster recovery.

“When the Executive Committee discussed disaster recovery measures for our mission-critical accounting systems, we also examined the state of IT systems,” says Tadashi Fujita, Executive Officer of Higo Bank and General Manager of IT. “Because the parts of our IT system already migrated to SaaS would be operable if a disaster struck Kumamoto, we decided that our on-premises systems required disaster recovery measures too.”

From the outset, deliberations planned to use cloud hyperscaler’s services. The bank selected three cloud vendors and compared them, ultimately choosing Microsoft Azure. As VMware products had advanced on-premises virtualization, the bank aimed to run Azure VMware Solution for quick cloud-based recovery if the on-premises environment went down.

Takeshita explains why the organization chose Azure for disaster recovery below.

“We’d been using Windows Server and other Microsoft products for a while. Our enterprise contract enabled us to build a disaster recovery site with Azure relatively inexpensively. Securely connecting to our on-premises environment with Azure ExpressRoute, seamless integration with Microsoft 365, and Azure services were also attractive features. We now access Azure OpenAI via Azure ExpressRoute.”

Secure cloud management through high-level security and compliance also influenced the decision. Azure's advanced security standards comply with ISO/IEC 27001, FISC Security Guidelines, and other strict financial sector regulations.

Higo Bank began building its disaster recovery site in January 2025, and the system went live just three months later. Its configuration is shown in the illustration below.

For daily operations, branches access the virtual platform located at the administrative center (on-premises) to perform duties on virtual desktops through Remote Desktop Session Host (RDSH) and virtual back-end servers. Meanwhile, the system copies data from the on-premises virtual platform to Azure VMware Solution virtual machines on Azure for backup. If a disaster takes down the administrative center, the bank can start up virtual machines on Azure VMware Solution, which branches can access via RDSH running on high-performance servers at head office.

Switchover within two hours, more uses in the future

Before launching the system, Higo Bank conducted a switchover test assuming a disaster had taken the administrative center down. Tominaga provides details as follows.

“We extend Layer 2^*1 by combining Azure ExpressRoute and VPN services, so there’s no need to change destination IP addresses on branch clients. We can quickly switch over simply by changing the configurations of our VPN service switches. Our test confirmed our goal of completing switchover in under two hours.”

The bank’s first targets for disaster recovery measures were RDSH servers running the terminal system and servers for office applications and files. If these servers fail, business stops and access to SaaS ends. “We plan to gradually expand our disaster recovery measures to more systems,” says Takeshita. “This will be easy because Azure VMware Solution provides the flexibility to increase our resources.”

## Footnotes

^*1 Layer 2 extension: A method of integrating remote networks over wide-area lines to make them appear to be in a single LAN.

Higo Bank is also looking to leverage Azure VMware Solution for other uses. One possibility is to host new IT applications on the Azure product instead of on-premises.

“Earthquakes have damaged our 40-year-old administrative center, and we’re not sure how long it will last. It’s not sensible to add more on-premises equipment there, so we wanted an effective balance between on-premises use and Azure VMware Solution, which is interoperable with on-premises solutions,” explains Fujita.

The new virtual environment on Azure VMware Solution is providing a greater degree of freedom than an exclusively on-premises system. The bank now has many more options for risk management and its IT departments are freer and safer than ever. According to Fujita, “This expanded scope is yet another major benefit of deploying Azure VMware Solution.”