As digital transformation becomes ever more essential, cloud-based transformation has become a common choice for global telecom carriers.
Gartner has forecast that carriers around the world will increase their investment in cloud-based transformation at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 27% in the next five years. Carriers of course retain their core traditional services as a stable base for communications, but they increasingly offer rapidly developing, innovative services to expand into new market segments.
Huawei’s distributed cloud is designed to meet the requirements of carriers, with Huawei Cloud supporting innovative agile services and Cloud Stack supporting core steady-state services. This combined offering enables cloud-based transformation of carriers’ internal services and B2B service growth.
With 30 years of experience in the telecom industry and rich cloud transformation project practices, Huawei has an in-depth understanding of carriers' requirements for IT infrastructure. In Huawei’s experience, distributed cloud is better suited to carriers given that many have entered new business verticals to cope with intense market competition. They have rolled out new services in sectors such as video, gaming, and mobile finance, and all of these exact greater requirements on the carrier’s IT infrastructure.
Some traditional carrier services, such as billing and operations & management, grow steadily – the so-called ‘stable services’. Newer services experience dramatic fluctuations and require fast iteration through trial and error, such as video, network disk, and cloud smartphone apps – the ‘agile services’. Huawei's distributed cloud architecture supports deployment both on-premises and on public cloud, delivering consistent experience online and offline and enabling carriers to support both stable and agile services at the same time.
Huawei Cloud Stack is deployed on premises with low latency and abundant cloud services, making operations more efficient. It provides secure and reliable infrastructure to meet the needs of core stable services. Huawei Cloud Stack has the widest range of high-level on-premises cloud services, and is the only on-premises cloud that reuses installed base storage.
Huawei public cloud supports rapid service innovation. The software development production line provides one-stop DevSecOps development and O&M capabilities, while the data governance production line provides one-stop digital and intelligent convergence development and governance, shortening carriers' service innovation period.
In terms of cloud-based service transformation, the key to app pre-integration is security, reliability, and rapid innovation. Huawei's own software services are pre-integrated with Huawei Cloud to provide better network performance through CEE Turbo, optimize cloud resource utilization, reduce TCO by over 30%, and shorten the TTM of typical projects by two months.
The key to data governance is real-time analysis and cross-domain convergence. Data is the most important means of production in the intelligence era, and is growing at an exponential rate. Taking the telecom industry as an example, BOM data has grown more than 10 times, so unlocking the value of data is of great significance.
Huawei Cloud intelligent data lake integrates data from multiple domains and sources and realizes one-stop data governance through digital and intelligent convergence. By supporting access to more than 40 data sources and scheduling of more than 100,000 concurrent tasks, it enables data correlation across different sources without data replication. Fast real-time analysis can drive user conversion, enable complaint handling, ensure experience, and eliminate data silos.
Carriers are vigorously developing B2B services to realize the second growth curve. The B2B telecom market has tripled in size in the past five years, and Huawei Cloud supports the flexible deployment and business model of B2B telecom services to drive rapid growth of the B2B segment.
As networks develop, fast cloud services and slow network speeds during enterprise cloud migration become a prominent problem. Huawei's one-stop cloud network solution combines NaaS with cloud services to provide one-click cloud network provisioning, shortening the provisioning time from two weeks to a few days. Network, 5G, and cloud capabilities come together to shorten end-to-end latency of private lines and intra-cloud networks, as well as reliability of cloud migration of private lines and 5G private networks.
Data storage is also becoming a pressing issue – particularly given the important role that carriers play within the digital economy. Carriers produce and transmit increasingly massive amounts of data, and must build a future-oriented data foundation to truly demonstrate the value contained within.
Carriers face numerous challenges as the industry landscape changes. As 5G stimulates demand for more services and applications, we will see rapid data growth, with the number of service app types expected to increase from thousands in the 2G era to 3.2 million. It is estimated that by 2030, yottabytes of data will be generated every year, a 22-fold increase over 2021.
A growing number of countries and regions - including China, Europe, and the Middle East – are attaching increasing importance to data security, enacting laws and regulations to ensure citizens' information security. For example, Turkey has introduced laws requiring citizens' digital footprints to be retained for a period of not less than six months and not more than two years. During this time, the data’s accuracy, integrity and confidentiality must be maintained.
According to OnAudience, the global data market rose from $41.4 billion in 2020 to $52.3 billion in 2021, up by 26%, suggesting people are increasingly interested in deriving value from data.
Data is a means of production and a core asset of digital transformation. Carriers need to build secure, efficient, and intelligent data storage infrastructure to support the intelligent evolution of data storage and meet new service needs. Huawei's next-gen OneStorage solution supports multi-cloud architecture in all scenarios, enabling data mobility and app deployment across multiple clouds, and provides high-performance and large-capacity data resource pools, enabling the intelligent upgrading of digital storage solutions. The OneStorage solution supports multi-cloud interconnection, ensuring greater security and reliability at system level as well as greater energy efficiency, making it the best foundation for carriers' data infrastructure.
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