H13-811_V3.0-ENU test success - HCIA-Cloud Service V3.0 Updated: 2024

The Digital Future in Europe

The future of European organisations and industries is looking increasingly digital and cloud-centric.  According to Foundry’s Digital Business Study 2023, 91% of EMEA organisations have adopted or plan to adopt a digital-first business strategy. At the same time, Foundry’s Cloud Computing Study 2023 found that 71% of EMEA organisations are defaulting to cloud-based services when upgrading or purchasing, while 60% have been accelerating their cloud migrations over the past year.

EMEA organisations expect cloud computing to Excellerate productivity, enable innovation and new product/service development, and upgrade legacy tech with lower total cost of ownership. 54% of IT Decision Makers also expect to use cloud capabilities to leverage Artificial Intelligence (AI)/Machine Learning (ML) over the next year, which many see as a potential game changer for their industries.

However, EMEA organisations are facing challenges in their digital and cloud journeys. 34% reported a lack of the right skill sets, while 29% cited complexity of IT infrastructure as a major hurdle. There were also concerns around data privacy and security, cloud costs, and compliance issues which would need to be addressed before organisations could reap the potential offered by the cloud.

Enabling Industries through Everything as a Service

To help European industries and organisations overcome these challenges and quickly enable cloud initiatives, Huawei Cloud has adopted a strategy of “Everything as a Service.” This comprises multiple tenets:

• Infrastructure as a Service allows industry partners to rapidly scale their computing, network and storage across Huawei’s global access network, comprising 30 Regions and 84 Availability Zones across more than 170 countries
• Technology as a Service makes available Huawei’s continuous innovation and leading-edge capabilities in cloud-native, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and data and media, offering organisations more flexibility and choice in their technology partnerships
• Expertise as a Service taps on Huawei’s three decades of experience in ICT, as well as the best practices of its network of global partners

Leading innovation in cloud-native, data, and AI

Huawei’s answer to the growing demand for cloud-native as the platform-of-choice for digitalisation is KooVerse: Huawei Cloud’s distributed infrastructure of storage, computing, networking, and security resources, designed with a unified architecture on a globally accessible platform to help organisations leverage the latest in cloud-native services and technologies.

To that point, Huawei is the only founding member of the Cloud-Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) from Asia, due to its consistent investment in developing and improving cloud-native services such as Ubiquitous Cloud-Native Services (UCS), Cloud Container Engine (CCE) Turbo, Cloud Container Instance (CCI), and CCE AutoPilot. In the Netherlands, these services helped 433, the world’s biggest football community, Excellerate production efficiency and reduce costs by 25%.

On the data side, GuassDB is the result of 20 years of experience developing databases. Huawei’s next-generation distributed cloud database is designed for high availability and security, performance and flexibility. GaussDB has been widely used in banking, insurance, securities, and energy.

Tailoring AI for Industries

Building on its “AI for Industries” strategy, Huawei Cloud designed Pangu pre-trained AI models, tailored for a range of industries including finance, government, manufacturing, mining, meteorology, and railways.

“Huawei Cloud Pangu models will empower everyone from every industry with an intelligent assistant,” says Zhang Ping’an, Huawei’s Executive Director and CEO of Huawei Cloud, “and help to reshape all industries with AI.”

In the field of meteorology, the Pangu weather model has become the first to achieve better precision than state-of-the-art numerical weather prediction methods, with a prediction speed several orders of magnitude faster. Consider how the Pangu model was able to predict a 10-day typhoon trajectory in 10 seconds against five hours using current methods. These ground-breaking results were published in the July edition of the scientific journal Nature. In pharmaceutical R&D, the Pangu drug molecule model has drastically shortened lead compound discovery cycles from years to a single month, while achieving a 70% reduction of costs.

Building Trust in the Cloud

Addressing a key concern for EMEA IT leaders, Huawei Cloud has more than 120 security and compliance certifications, including C5 certification with zero deviation. Huawei Cloud provides compliance consulting and security services, while Huawei’s Compliance Compass platform helps users ensure security and compliance.

To help build trust in cloud services in the EU, Huawei Cloud works with SCOPE Europe and EU Cloud CoC to contribute to the Third Country Transfers Module and GDPR Compliance Standards. Huawei Cloud has also released white papers to share its expertise on privacy protection, data security and cloud security, and is a Board Member of the EU Cloud Code of Conduct General Assembly.

Huawei Cloud sees stability and reliability as critical lifelines. Deterministic Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) offers service availability of over 99.99%, with recovery four times faster than industry average. In addition, Huawei Cloud offers a three-level support system, deploying five service teams in Europe, and a series of 24/7 support centers worldwide. 

Bringing Local to a Global Ecosystem

As a global cloud service provider, Huawei Cloud offers expertise and experience in digitalisation and globalisation, as well as ecosystem capabilities to help partners expand into global markets. A leading Chinese car brand was able to earn compliance certification and deploy their solution in one month to get their business up and running in Europe. Huawei Cloud also supports French manufacturers with resources to expand in China.

Complementing globalisation, Huawei Cloud also offers localisation experience and access to local and global partners through the “Go Cloud, Grow Cloud” ecosystem. “We share capabilities and success with our partners,” says Jacqueline Shi, President of Huawei Cloud Global Marketing and Sales Service. “Only when the local ecosystem grows, can digital transformation grow, in a healthy and sustainable way.”

The number of Huawei Cloud partners in Europe has grown 400% in 2023 alone, with a five-fold growth in the number of partner solutions. Over the next five years, Huawei Cloud aims to support 1,000 European startups to grow on cloud, further building innovation within the ecosystem.

Contributing to the Cloud for Good

Besides digital ecosystems, Huawei Cloud is using its cloud and AI expertise to help protect Europe’s rich natural ecosystems and species. For global environmental protection organisations such as IUCN and Rainforest Connection, ICT is becoming a crucial tool to protect forests, wetlands, and oceans in countries like Italy, Norway and Ireland.

In Norway, for example, the population of Atlantic Salmon has been declining rapidly, under threat from an invasive species: humpback salmon. The humpback has disrupted food chains, introduced diseases, and upset the natural balance of native ecosystems. Huawei’s AI solution is helping to save Norway’s endangered Atlantic Salmon by identifying humpback salmon with an accuracy of up to 91%, so they can be blocked from entering upstream channels.

A European Future with Huawei

Since 2016, Huawei Cloud has worked with partners to serve more than 3,000 European organisations across a range of industries. By continuing to invest in innovation and trust while leveraging local and global expertise, Huawei Cloud will continue to be a reliable partner in Europe, for Europe, creating new value for industries and accelerating intelligence with the “Everything as a Service” strategy.

Click here to learn how Huawei Cloud solutions can help transform your organisation.

G&J Pepsi-Cola Bottlers, the largest family-owned Pepsi franchise in the US, is based in Ohio. The company employs some 1,600 workers, most of whom are mobile. Over the last five years, the IT staff at G&J has migrated all of the company's critical infrastructure and application environments to the cloud, driving a digital transformation with dramatic repercussions for the business as a whole.

Eric McKinney, Cloud Services Manager at G&J, explained that the move began with Microsoft Exchange Online. His staff was happy to offload the burden of backup and archiving, and users were excited to see their mailbox sizes jump from 50MB to 50GB.

Expanding from email to critical systems

The cloud journey continued to SharePoint Online and OneDrive; McKinney and his team pushed out social communication tools like Yammer and Skype, as well. "About two years ago, because of these cloud technologies, our user accounts exploded from about 400 to about 1,600 users, with about 1,100 mobile users," he said. He credits the Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) solution with helping manage this small army of workers and devices. He added:

We needed to provide single sign-on for ADP [payroll services], for Oracle, for Meraki, for all of these software-as-a-service solutions that we have. We also needed to secure our mobile devices and push applications to them. We've completely transformed the way our business operates.

Nathan Foster, Business Applications Manager at G&J, explained how cloud computing helped save time, money, and stress. "Users fell in love with the large mailboxes and we started to fall in love with what the cloud could provide us," he said.

We were staring down the barrel of a storage upgrade just to keep our users happy with the amount of file server space. We were looking at what it would cost to just buy the equipment to replace what we already had. Huge numbers. [But] We were able to move items to the cloud. All of our file server storage, all of our Exchange storage, all of our SharePoint storage, and not have to replace that equipment. With that equipment also comes a lot of load on us IT people. There's headaches of back-ups, replications, snapshots. Did all that stuff happen in the way it's supposed to? We don't have to worry about that anymore with the cloud.

Leading the mobile revolution

"If you look at what [G&J] were doing before, everything was paper-based. Two-thirds of their employees are in the field, they're mobile, and every morning those employees had to come in and they would get a stack of papers that would call out what they were going to do for the day. If they needed to make any adjustments or there were any opportunities, it was very difficult for them to [communicate]; it just wasn't very agile," explained Brad Anderson, Corporate Vice President at Microsoft.

With cloud-based productivity apps and EMS, the game has changed. "If they have a fantastic idea or they want to share something, they take a picture, they scribble something in OneNote, it gets shared with everyone else in the field and back to corporate headquarters," Anderson enthused. "The collaboration and the ability for the organization to be agile and adjust to business is through-the-roof positive, but it also needs to be secured, and that's where they use EMS. They're using Intune to manage all the mobile devices and make sure that that corporate data is secure and safe. They're also using Azure Active Directory Premium to do that single sign-on to all the cloud apps that they're using."

McKinney added that G&J was already using Microsoft Intune to manage its desktop computers, so expanding it to the mobile realm was easy. In fact, once user groups and permissions were set up in Intune, Nathan Foster was able to create a step-by-step playbook that non-IT staff at the company can use to enroll new devices.

"My role was to develop a playbook where we could empower other people in the company to enroll a phone and then have all the other parts of it automated," Foster said. "Once a phone gets rolled out, all the apps hit, all the policies hit. It's not even configuration files; it's just point-and-click inside Intune, telling the system what it's supposed to do per group, assigning the users to the group, and then having them log in to the phone.

Transforming business and IT relationships

"It's really transformed our whole department," said Chris Witzgall, VP of Information Systems at G&J. "Prior to moving to Microsoft cloud, we spent a lot of time keeping servers and storage devices updated, running, refreshed. Now we can use that time we save that we used to do that, and now we're transforming the business in ways that they've never seen before by helping them adopt and initiate new technologies that we have available to us."

Daniel Foster, Director of IT at G&J, described the transition's effect on his IT team. "When your team starts to transition into the cloud, they go away from doing typical patch management, server installations, those sorts of things. They have to refocus," he said. Cloud services are easier to manage than on-premises technologies, so the IT pros at G&J have shifted from a 'check off items on a to-do list' mentality to a problem-solving role.

"We have to research, and read some white papers, and learn what the tools can do," he explained, "but a lot of their time now is spent figuring out, 'how do I get this to work and solve a problem' versus just, 'I want to check the box.'"

In the next installment, we'll explore how McKinney and the Fosters used Microsoft Power BI and PowerApps to solve everyday challenges and create a new revenue stream for G&J.

Kheti Venture Pvt. Ltd., the category winner, received a Huawei Cloud worth $3000, while other finalists in the same category received Huawei Cloud worth $500 each.

Ivan Mo, Head of Huawei Cloud, said during the award ceremony, "I want to congratulate all winners and finalists for their contribution in the ICT sector. We are very pleased to see the growth of startups in Nepal." He further added that a local team is working vigorously to promote Nepali startups, and that the company believes Huawei cloud service is now fully capable of supporting Nepali startups of all sizes.

During the event, Minister for Communications and Information Technology Gyanendra Bahadur Karki handed over a token of appreciation to William Zhang, CEO of Huawei Nepal, for continuing its support for ICT Award, and altogether ICT sector of Nepal.

Huawei expressed its commitment to continue its support such events to promote the development of the ICT industry in Nepal, staying true to its vision to promote the development of the ICT industry in Nepal.