Huawei Cloud makes African cloud adoption smoother, safer, more enjoyable

Harrison Li, CTO of Huawei Cloud South Africa.

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Huawei Cloud is bringing a series of new solutions to market in the coming months, to simplify the cloud journey and help organisations innovate.

This is according to Harrison Li, CTO of Huawei Cloud South Africa, who was speaking at the Huawei Eco-Connect Sub-Saharan Africa 2023 conference in Sandton.

Comparing a cloud adoption life cycle to a safari, Li said safety, convenience and experience were top considerations for a successful ride.

For safety, Huawei Cloud has increased its availability zones and CDNs, and is launching new security technologies. He said: “So we can ensure high availability, high security and high redundancy, with a reliable network connecting South Africa to other regions. To ensure all African customers can use Huawei Cloud, we have sites in South Africa, Kenya and Nigeria and have announced one more in Egypt. In the coming two years, we are also planning new data centres in West and East Africa.”

Li said: “Other safety features include security services such as our cloud-native firewall with AI detection engine. A lot of services are coming, including a Data Security Centre, Managed Threat Detection, Advanced Anti-DDoS, Cloud Bastion Host – a unified security management and control platform, and Compliance Compass – a security compliance assessment and governance platform and global template to proactively check cloud resources.”

“But safe driving is not enough – we also need the convenience of a smooth journey. A lot of customers are talking about how to save costs without impacting cloud adoption. This has led to the emergence of FinOps. Huawei Cloud is planning a new service to support FinOps, called Cloud Financial Management (CFM), which is built to enable cost optimisation.”

Li said cloud convenience also depends on simplified cloud management and easy operations. “We are launching new services to optimise cloud management, including a Resource Formation Service, Resource Access Manager, and Organisations – to centrally manage multiple accounts. We are also introducing Config – tracking all public cloud configurations, and Optimisation Analyser – to analyse configurations and performance, with recommendations.”

In terms of network components, Li announced the new Huawei Enterprise Router, Enterprise Switch and Global Accelerator.

Li emphasised the Huawei Cloud native database built on GaussDB, which is available in the South African region.

GaussDB is an enterprise-grade distributed relational database. A GaussDB instance can be deployed across AZs with zero data loss, supports more than 1 000 nodes and can process petabytes of data. Huawei Cloud also offers GaussDB DWS, a cloud-native data warehouse, he said.

For big data and AI innovation, Li highlighted Huawei Cloud solutions including DataArts Studio – a one-stop data governance platform covering the entire data life cycle; Huawei Cloud ModelArts – a one-stop AI development platform that enables developers and data scientists of any skill level to rapidly build models; large models to lower the barrier to AI development, improve model generalisation and address application fragmentation, and Graph Engine Service (GES). He also noted Huawei Cloud’s IOT platform, which helps organisations remotely manage fleets of IOT devices and integrate them with big data or AI learning tools.

Li said Huawei Cloud’s approach of offering everything as a service encompassed infrastructure as a service, technology as a service and expertise as a service.