Roc Bai, Vice President, Huawei Cloud Southern Africa Region

In the modern digital world, African enterprises face numerous challenges that are not always within their direct control. These include undersea cable breakages, which impact on their connectivity, as well as significant issues relating to data sovereignty. Essentially, says Roc Bai, Vice President, Huawei Cloud Southern Africa Region, these businesses want to move from siloed legacy platforms, and, instead, achieve stable and localised infrastructure with end-to-end security.

“Just like any other business in the information age, these businesses require a secure, efficient, and localised cloud foundation, one that provides a cost-effective service, along with comprehensive security solutions that can guarantee the security of their network. The Huawei Cloud Stack is the best choice to meet these needs,” he says.

“Huawei Cloud Stack has been shown to outperform competitors on cost, support and features. Moreover, we are able to consolidate all these resources in the cloud, while also assisting organisations to reduce their investment in storage solutions. In this way, they are able to save money that they can then sink back into their business in the form of innovation.”

Continuous innovation is vital in a rapidly evolving world, he continues, and with the Huawei Cloud Stack in place, customers are able to acquire cutting-edge technologies, like AI large model, big data, etc

“Huawei Cloud Stack is now providing trusted cloud infrastructure, innovative cloud service abilities and extensive industry know-how, to help government and enterprise customers in Africa accelerate cloud adoption.

“Our offering also provides enhanced capabilities for AI, industrial internet, data circulation and software development. Our aim is to be the preferred cloud for intelligent transformation in Africa, and for Africa, delivering better technologies, industry solutions, and ecosystem resources to our customers and partners.” Bai points out that as African businesses drive forward with cloud adoption and intelligent transformation, they are encountering a variety of challenges, including inefficient methods of acquiring cloud resources, as well as the aforementioned issues with submarine optical cables and the concerns over data sovereignty.

“These challenges are met by the Huawei Cloud Stack, which leverages three strengths: providing on-premised, reliable and secure cloud infrastructure; offering an extensive suite of over 110 cloud services; and offering a diversified partner ecosystem. These strengths are designed to help public and private sector customers in Africa to accelerate industry intelligence,” he adds. “Huawei Cloud looks forward to working closely with its African partners to build a new foundation, via the Huawei Cloud Stack, for an intelligent world, helping them to develop digital solutions and reshape their industries with intelligence.”

Among the many Huawei Cloud Stack value propositions are Huawei’s AI-native GaussDB, an enterprise-grade distributed relational database, featuring high scalability, robust performance and high reliability. Bai explains that GaussDB decouples storage and compute for scalability, improved performance and an enhanced user experience.

“The digital transformation wave has had a significant impact on traditional infrastructure. The database is ultimately the foundation on which this transformation is built. In order to truly unleash the value of your data, in this era of Big Data and AI, there are four challenges to overcome.

“Firstly, one must be able to process massive, distributed, and heterogeneous data with databases. Secondly, there is a need to maintain high performance under high concurrent processing. In addition, businesses need to ensure all-round security and address the challenge of data breaches. Finally, it must be recognised that digitalisation demands a rich local ecosystem. ”

He indicates that GaussDB provides a trustworthy data foundation for mission-critical workloads, the kind where high availability, performance, security, scalability, and intelligence are non-negotiable. Bai adds that the solution is easy to deploy and migrate to, and that the core code is 100% developed by Huawei. It’s also the world’s first AI-native database, and can be oriented towards development and operation and maintenance, bringing a full process to provide a smart experience.

“The most important thing for our customers is cost-efficiency, something that GaussDB is very effective at delivering, and higher performance at a larger scale in cloud. In this respect, GaussDB is highly available, secure and scalable, and provides services, including quick deployment, backup, restoration, monitoring and alarm reporting for enterprises,” he states.

“Furthermore, it supports multi-tenancy and data compression, and can reduce storage costs by up to 50%, while improving resource utilisation by over four times. Around 60% of IT investment today is in databases, and this investment is growing as databases become increasingly important for delivering on service level agreements (SLAs) and customer experience.”

He points out further that Huawei is aware that more and more enterprises are seeking to reduce costs and improve performance, which is why the company believes that a high-performance, highly reliable, distributed database technology like GaussDB will replace centralised databases.

“In the end, Huawei Cloud Southern Africa is bringing its Huawei Cloud Stack, which includes GaussDB, to the continent, with a view to enabling its African customers to make the leap to the cloud, and to accelerate industrial intelligence as they ride the digital transformation wave,” concludes Bai.

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