Harrison Li - CTO at Huawei Cloud Southern Africa.

There can be little doubt that the cloud is the foundation on which the global drive towards digital transformation is built. Huawei understands the importance of the cloud in ICT’s future, and, as such, the company focused on showcasing its latest cloud solutions at the recent Huawei Eco Connect Day at the Sandton Convention Centre.

It was noted that on the African continent, latency remains one of the biggest challenges to effective use of the cloud. It is for this reason that Huawei is aligning closely with local operators, to extend its network into various nations across Africa.

According to Harrison Li, CTO at Huawei Cloud Southern Africa, the goal is to create what he refers to as connectivity circles’ within specific regions, notably Western, Eastern and Southern Africa.

These connectivity circles, which should have latency of less than 100 milliseconds, will be centred around our African datacentres.

We launched a new data centre in Johannesburg at the end of 2022, and are now running 3 Availability Zones within the South Africa region. We’re also glad to announce that a new CDN edge node is now available in Cape Town, and we will also open new regional data centers in Lagos and Nairobi in the next two years” he says.

In order to achieve such low latency, Huawei works closely and in partnership with key local network PoPs, to help extend its network so that even African nations without local datacentres can access the Huawei Cloud with no latency issues.

He adds that the company speaks to a future where it will deliver ‘Everything as a Service’ (EaaS), and that EaaS is built on three key pillars. The first of these, is global infra structure, and with Huawei Cloud already globally pervasive, the company can easily deliver Infrastructure as a Service worldwide.

The second pillar is Technology as a Service, which is all about offering potential customers templated or packaged technology services that enable them to access and utilise the cloud easily with different pipelines, and in an efficient and effective manner.

The final pillar we call, Expertise as a Service. This involves partnering with local systems integrators that are able to build applications on top of our cloud and, using our APIs to deliver end to end turnkey cloud solutions.

Naturally, any talk of cloud services and solutions is incomplete without the security discussion. Huawei, suggests Li, focuses on ensuring compliance at a global, regional and national level. The company is also consistent in its ongoing development of cloud native security features, to help protect customer workloads in an Infrastructure or Platform as a Service environment.

Another new cloud offering we have is a management service, designed to assist customers to administer their cloud services more efficiently. For example, the service helps to track cloud service usage, offering a deeper understanding of services and workloads, along with recommendations around how to tweak your model, in order to make it more cost effective,” he says.

Furthermore, he adds, Huawei will be launching new cloud services focusing on technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) big data and the Internet of Things (IoT), options that have not been available in the African market before.

Ultimately, Huawei Cloud’s long term goal is to offer customers across the continent and beyond a full cloud service solution. One where, whatever form of ‘as a service they require, it can easily be deployed, with the latest in AI or IoT technology running on top of this. Combined with our focus on reducing latency as far as possible, and our management service that helps clients improve efficiencies and reduce costs, Huawei Cloud’s focus on Everything as a Service will take the cloud to the next level across Africa and the rest of the globe,” concludes Li.