Johannesburg, 11 May 2021
South Africa’s Automobile Association (AASA) has overcome infrastructure challenges and reduced costs by around 10% per year by partnering with Huawei Cloud to manage its systems and applications.
The 91-year-old AASA is a non-profit organisation with around five million registered users and 700 000 subscribers. It provides road security, roadside assistance and vehicle-related services to private consumers, transportation firms, road administration, police, as well as finance and insurance organisations. The organisation uses many types of apps, and most of its services are consumer-facing.
Having previously hosted its infrastructure in a local data centre, AASA faced several challenges as its business expanded. The need for computing resources increased, and AASA faced scaling, availability and security challenges.
Service volumes peak on holidays and weekends, when Web site and app traffic was placing a heavy strain on its limited resources. Constantly expanding infrastructure to support business growth was delivering diminishing returns on investment.
Other pain points AASA needed to overcome included unstable services due to power outages, poor performance from the traditional virtualisation environment; expensive operations and maintenance when purchasing devices from multiple vendors; and outdated, inflexible Enterprise Service Bus (ESB) architecture.
With Huawei Cloud IaaS managing compute, storage, database and monitoring services, AASA is now able to run its workloads more efficiently. By using services across multiple Huawei Cloud availability zones, AASA can also enjoy on-demand, zero-downtime upgrades with the latest security patches.
“Since migrating to Huawei Cloud, AASA has been able to keep costs down through more flexible billing,” said Huawei spokesperson Stone He. “When more computing nodes are needed, Huawei Cloud automatically engages pay-per-use instances to expand resources to meet growing business demands. We’ve helped AASA reduce costs by at least 10% per year. Deploying applications on Huawei Cloud was also easy, as the solution does not require setting up compute, storage and network infrastructures. AASA enjoys hassle-free infrastructure and can easily scale up cloud resources whenever needed.”
“Through face-to-face training and workshops with the Huawei Cloud South Africa team, we learned that Huawei Cloud is easy to use and can fully support our production environment,” said AASA chief technology officer Jaco van der Merwe.
Huawei Cloud has tripled its customer base and doubled its registered partner numbers in recent months, thanks to the measurable improvements it is delivering for customers.
“We predict these numbers to grow substantially over the next few months, and we see South Africa becoming a cloud hub for the continent,” said Stone He.
Huawei Cloud is a trusted Cloud Transformation companion, creating value for customers through leading technology, hosted locally. Huawei Cloud aligns with global security standards and delivers a consistent experience, regardless of the organisation’s size. With expert local support and world-class experience, Huawei Cloud delivers customised services and solutions, dedicated technical resources from idea to implementation, free migration and POC credits, and guaranteed cost savings without sacrificing performance: customers pay only when value is realised.
Email: huaweicloudsa@huawei.com
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