How Huawei empowers customers to optimise multi-cloud environments

It’s no surprise that organisations across the Middle East today are making the move from traditional in-house infrastructure to the cloud. Cost, performance, management and space savings are all important motivators.

In particular, the hybrid cloud environment has become one of the most preferred as organisations can use a mix of on-premises private cloud and third-party public cloud services with orchestration between the two platforms. There are, however, different hybrid cloud architectures. The heterogeneous architecture is perhaps the most prominent. In a heterogeneous model, the environment is built with public and private technologies from different vendors. An enterprise chooses a public cloud provider, such as AWS or Azure, and pairs it with a private offering, such as OpenStack.

Initially, many organisations pursued a multi-cloud strategy because they were uncertain about cloud reliability. Multi-cloud computing can indeed help organisations meet those requirements, since they can select from multiple IaaS providers’ data centre regions or availability zones.

This trend has continued following an explosion of new applications in cloud computing. With the roll-out of 5G, for example, there will be real-time transfer speed between the cloud and devices with zero lag. Therefore, the response time for computation and storage will be the same for both cloud and device. Cloud businesses are also going through a major development of their AI capabilities to offer a competitive edge to enterprise customers. Traditionally a single Cloud Service Provider (CSP) would be challenged to meet all of these application requirements, so it follows that a multi-cloud solution was the inevitable choice for enterprises.

Yet in this multi-cloud environment, organisational leaders still want simplicty. They want a single solution that can provide a fully-integrated cloud service system.  They require integrating network, compute and storage resources in data centres to unify the virtual and physical worlds, implementing multi-cloud connectivity and cloud-based network automation to make cloud computing easier.

Even in today’s IT environment, some cloud operations managers and business owners still face challenges. There’s often a lack of in-depth information on infrastructure utilization, as well as sub-optimal utilization of hardware infrastructure. There can also be a lack of historic data to analyze periodicity or seasonality in usage patterns, and hence get the most out of cloud investments. The inability to accurately predict usage for future provisioning also means difficulties apportioning hardware costs for internal charge back based on usage.

For this reason, building an open, collaborative cloud ecosystem is key to drive success in the digitalisation era. We feel it is essential to work with CSPs to optimise cloud infrastructure resource utilisation, drive proactive risk assessment, and provide a 360-degree view of the infrastructure. There’s also an opportunity to help CSP to identify operational slack and improve ROI by using underutilised infrastructure components.

We are doing this today by teaming up with global partners in the public cloud domain to combine cloud, network, and digital services. We believe in focusing on full-stack platform capabilities, end-to-end service capabilities, and comprehensive ecosystem partnerships. In addition, we are committed to providing a wide array of hybrid cloud solutions that support homogeneous and heterogeneous architectures. This type of coordination and collaboration across industries will drive cloud innovation at scale.

In the end, by using AI, cloud, and big data technologies, businesses in the region will better understand their customers’ needs, and will be able to provide a more personalised experience for every customer.