Huawei Cloud: Accelerating intelligence in Europe, for Europe

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 improve 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, improve 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.

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