Johannesburg, 03 Oct 2019
The whole world has gone digital, and it is irrevocably changing our personal and business lives. A slew of new digital technologies bring new possibilities for more personalised, convenient and inexpensive service experiences.
“And nowhere are digital services needed more than in government,” says Fred Saayman, Huawei Business Unit: Executive at Pinnacle ICT, SA’s leading local ICT distributor. “Forward-thinking government departments around the world are transforming digitally to offer citizens, better, agile, more accessible and more accurate services.”
However, at the same time as governments are trying to meet citizens’ demands for services that are convenient and user-centric, they are having to face hurdles in terms of limited resources, and a growing number of users, he explains.
“Realising the potential benefits brought about by digital government means developing cost-effective, efficient and secure solutions for citizens, private sector organisations, and all other stakeholders. These solutions need to be tailored to their specific needs, and must also have the ability to collaborate within and across government agencies, and enable data-driven insights and more intelligent decisions.”
Bringing this vision to fruition is even more crucial in times of austerity, where governments in all countries are trying to do more with less, and spending only on the top priorities. “Moreover, no government can even begin to transform digitally if they don’t have the appropriate infrastructure in place, and if they can’t guarantee that their services are always available when they need to be.”
“Huawei’s all-flash storage with industry-leading performance can help governments accelerate their digital transformation initiatives,” adds Saayman. “Traditional disc-based storage sees data being recorded to a surface layer of one or more rotating disks, while flash memory is solid-state memory chips that have no moving parts. This gives flash storage some significant advantages over disc-based storage, and, together with an increasingly affordable price point for flash storage, particularly at scale, these advantages are seeing a massive uptake in flash, particularly for governments and large enterprises.”
Saayman says in the past, disc-based storage’s key advantage over flash was its price for the capacity it offered. “Flash was acceptable for USB drives that held one or two gigabytes, but when it boiled down to enterprise computing environments, storing the entire entity’s data within flash was simply unaffordable.”
But the price of flash has been dropping dramatically over the past few years, and public sector organisations are now looking beyond the expense, to the significant advantages that flash offers, including improved reliability, a lower cost to run and better performance.
“There was a time when flash-based storage was viewed as being less reliable and storage chips would need to be replaced more often. However, the reliability of flash is now equal to or better than that of disc solutions. In addition, because disc-based storage has moving parts, all of which need to be powered, while flash-based storage does not, flash is dramatically less expensive in terms of power usage.”
He says in terms of better performance, native-flash design from Huawei FlashLink technology offers a latency of only 0.5ms, and hence delivers a 10-fold improvement over traditional storage solutions. “And let’s not forget greater innovation. Flash is where innovation has its home when you think of the storage arena. For example, Huawei has earned more than 800 storage patents, and innovation of this nature is helping the flash storage industry remain relevant in a rapidly evolving technology industry that is increasingly being disrupted.”
The numbers, he says, speak for themselves. “Huawei’s solution improves taxation system performance three-fold, data query times are shortened to seconds, and the extraction of millions of tax data records is shortened to minutes.”
In addition, Huawei’s industry-leading solution features outstanding data compression capabilities, being able to compress a full 5G of data into 1G, and also saves power and lowers the physical footprint, reducing operating expenditure by up to 75%.
“Huawei’s 1 145 government customers from 114 countries speak to the success of its solutions, which ensure 24/7 availability of services to citizens, and are helping governments across the world to accelerate their digital transformations and innovations,” ends Saayman.
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