Huawei’s ‘Cloud-Native + distributed cloud’ builds the foundation for efficient digital transformation
The service continues to provide innovative technical services for global financial institutions
The digital economy is a powerful engine for accelerating industry transformation, upgrading and promoting high-quality economic development in the Middle East. As a driving force for national economic growth, the financial industry is also a core industry of digital economic development. Accordingly, the adoption of cloud services as a means of digital transformation in this sector is generally higher than in many other sectors.
Today’s financial industry has evolved from traditional banking, insurance, and securities into new fields such as Fintech. With the near ubiquitous expansion of smartphones and the Internet across the region in recent decades, the demand for online shopping and digital payments has also significantly increased, intensifying the financial enterprises’ requirement for digital transformation.
Most recently, the pandemic shifted people’s lifestyles from offline to online, further driving the digital transformation of the financial industry. According to one PwC estimate, 51% of the population are mainly shopping for groceries online in the Middle East. Meanwhile, revenues from online food ordering companies in the Middle East have more than tripled on average. This phenomenon has led Middle Eastern countries, which already consider the importance of the financial sector, to pay more attention to e-payments, online shopping, and the development of the digital economy. For instance, it was recently reported that Bahrain MPs are pushing for a fully cashless society within 10 years as the GCC looks beyond paper currency. Coherently, many banks have also launched new electronic payment applications during the pandemic.
As a critical step in digital transformation, today cloud computing plays an essential role in the financial industry. The new infrastructure of Huawei Cloud, being cloud-native and a distributed cloud, has been implemented in the financial sector, helping enterprises to reduce costs and improve efficiency.
Cloud-native technologies, represented by container and service grids, are gradually becoming a standard for financial IT architectures. The grid, storage, and computing capabilities of traditional infrastructures are also deeply interconnected with the cloud-native technology ecosystem, and the advantages of software and hardware collaboration are exerted. In addition, the public cloud, dedicated cloud, and edge cloud implement unified management and multi-cloud cooperation, and provide a cross-cloud consistent experience for financial services.
With the development of cloud computing technologies, the financial IT transformation and upgrade have entered a new stage: from the cloud-centered on resources to the cloud-native centered on applications. Oneclick deployment, intelligent scheduling, and comprehensive infrastructure governance help digitalize the financial industry. In addition, cloud-native technologies bring five major upgrades to financial enterprises, accelerating innovation in core financial services.
1. Infrastructure upgrade: The traditional x80 architecture is upgraded to cloud-native infrastructure, improving resource utilization by over 30%.
2. Application architecture upgrade: Upgrades a single layer to distributed microservices, improving elastic efficiency and implementing the second-level expansion.
3. Delivery mode upgrade: The delivery mode is upgraded from waterfall delivery mode with low freedom to DevOps, transforming delivery efficiency from months to days.
4. Deployment mode upgrade: The single-system silo model is upgraded to the associated system hybrid mode, improving the O&M efficiency by more than 50%.
5. Operation mode upgrade:
The operation mode of a single-center is upgraded to the multisite and multi-center way, implementing second-level fault migration, and significantly improving service reliability.
All-scenario distributed cloud services help enterprises reduce costs through elastic computing and the pay-asyou-go method. Meanwhile, multi-region and multi-center infrastructure deployment of the financial core system relies highly upon these cloud services. Distributed cloud combines public cloud services and Huawei Stack cloud services to ensure meeting service security, fast rollout requirements, customer data security, and fast delivery.
The financial solution developed by Huawei and ecosystem partners thus covers a wide range of fields. From banking cores to AI intelligent chatbots, from smart networks to mobile office apps, and from business intelligence to innovative data lake solutions, Huawei is equipping the financial industry with more and secure services.
Overall, the “cloud-native + distributed cloud” infrastructure will be an essential driving force for digital transformation in the financial industry. The combination of resource efficiency, agile application, intelligent service, secure and trusted Cloud-Native 2.0 technology, and distributed cloud featuring software and hardware collaboration, compliance, and full-stack dedication, will accelerate transformation of financial services.
As an essential partner in the digitization of the global financial industry, Huawei has worked with more than 150 partners worldwide to build more than 200 financial solutions, serving more than 2,000 financial customers in more than 60 countries and regions. In addition, Huawei Cloud continues to provide innovative technical services for global financial institutions such as banks, insurance, and securities. It is a trusted partner behind customers with advanced technology, industry knowledge, and scenario understanding, supporting financial institutions to become better digital enterprises.