South Korea's government aims to restore its most important administrative computer systems within one hour of a disaster, the Ministry of the Interior and Safety said, according to a Korea JoongAng Daily report Friday based on Yonhap. The plan comes a year after a fire at a state data center in Daejeon knocked out government online services across the country and took 95 days to fully recover from.

What Happened

The ministry will reclassify about 15,000 public information systems according to how critical they are. Disaster recovery for 13 core systems, including the disaster-safety information service and the resident registration system, will be prioritized, with a target date of the first half of next year.

The 76 systems in the highest tier, rated A1, will be set up for dual operation, running at separate data centers so that one site can take over if the other goes down.

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The National Information Resources Service (NIRS), which runs the government's data centers, will expand replication between its sites. Its Gongju center will copy 121 systems from the Daejeon center in real time by the first half of next year. The Gwangju and Daegu centers will have data replication in place during 2027, and storage disaster recovery is due to cover all systems at the Daejeon, Daegu and Gwangju centers by next year.

Hwang Gyu-cheol, who heads the ministry's AI Government Bureau, said the foundation for recovering from a large-scale failure will be in place by the end of next year.

Why It Matters

The fire broke out Sept. 26, 2025, at the NIRS data center in Daejeon, damaging servers and taking down government online services nationwide. Hundreds of systems went offline, and some public services were unavailable for weeks while officials rebuilt or moved them. Full recovery took 95 days.

The outage exposed how much of the government's digital infrastructure depended on one building without working failover to another site. A one-hour recovery goal for core systems is a direct response: it requires that critical services already be running, or ready to run, somewhere other than where the disaster hits.

The ranking exercise matters because not every one of the 15,000 systems can be duplicated at once. By sorting them into tiers, the ministry is deciding which services citizens can least afford to lose, starting with identity records and emergency information, and spending on resilience there first.

Context

South Korea is one of the most digitized governments in the world, with many routine dealings with the state handled online. The ministry has also been pushing an AI-driven government agenda, a goal reflected in the name of the bureau Hwang leads, and such services depend on the same underlying data centers.

The plan also spreads risk across more of NIRS's facilities. Daejeon, Gongju, Gwangju and Daegu each take on roles in replication and backup, rather than leaving the Daejeon complex as the primary home for a large share of government systems.

What to Watch

The first test comes in the first half of 2027, when the 13 core systems and the Gongju replication of 121 Daejeon systems are due. Replication at Gwangju and Daegu follows later in 2027. The report gives no budget figure, so watch for spending details in the government's budget process and for whether lower-tier systems receive any timeline for recovery improvements.