A university information system made robust against natural disasters by taking advantage of remotely distributed campuses

We present an information system designed for a university on the basis of its experiences with the 2011 East Japan earthquake. This system has two levels of security: 1) The website for public relations and the e-mail systems for communications that will work continuously even in the case of commercial power failure. 2) The personal computer systems that will be down during power failure but will restart working without any loss of data as soon as the power supply is back. The former has been implemented by employing a private cloud computing platform and a public one in combination. The latter is implemented by a file storage system that keeps the original copy on-premise in a campus and its backup copy in one of the other campuses. Its operations have shown that the communication traffic among the campuses increased only by half in order to keep the data safe against natural disasters.