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| The interior of KakaoBank's headquarters in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province / Courtesy of KakaoBank |
By Yi Whan-woo
KakaoBank will launch an emergency response team led by its chief information officer (CIO), the company announced on Tuesday, in the wake of Kakao's unprecedented service outage earlier this month.
The team will operate under the lender's counter-crisis division and take responsibility for taking emergency measures in the event of any future disasters that could affect banking operations directly or indirectly.
Its members will include manager-level IT experts recruited from the firm.
"We're deeply regretful for inconveniencing customers over the latest service outage," KakaoBank said in a statement.
It was referring to the meltdown of KakaoBank, Kakao Pay, KakaoTalk, KakaoMap Kakao T, Kakao Navi, Kakao Page, Kakao Webtoon, Melon and Kakao Games caused by a Oct. 15 battery fire at SK C&C's Pangyo building in Seongnam, Gyeonggi Province, where parent company Kakao housed 32,000 servers.
The services of Kakao and its affiliates have since been normalized.
Still, Kakao, one of Korea's two main tech conglomerates, faces mounting criticism for such a serious shortfall in tech expertise and crisis management capability, especially after advancing relentlessly into and seeking to dominate industries where mainly smaller firms were operating.
"We'll enhance drills against all possible crises on the occasion of the launch of the emergency response team, and accordingly, we will make sure to safeguard customers' assets and data on our path to offering high-quality services," the lender added.
Apart from those run by Kakao, KakaoBank currently runs three separate data centers ― one each in Seoul, Gyeonggi Province and Busan.
The Seoul data center is responsible for data operations in normal circumstances. Its role will be taken over by the Gyeonggi unit if its services are disrupted. The Busan unit is responsible for copying, transferring and storing data from Seoul in real time.
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