In today’s interconnected world, the financial industry is constantly in flux, driven by the ever-increasing pace of technological advancement. This rapid change brings with it challenges that require solutions of an equally transformative nature.
Primarily driven by the need to enhance user experience, service resilience and service security, this digital transition faces challenges from various aspects, including performance, availability, security, operations and maintenance (O&M), and energy consumption.
In response, Huawei, an ICT technology company, has laid out four strategic directions to navigate this complex landscape. These directions encompass the following objectives: constructing a resilient infrastructure, expediting application modernization, fostering scenario innovation, and empowering data-driven decision-making.
By leveraging this infrastructure, Huawei strives to enhance and redefine the future of the financial services industry, facilitating its seamless transition into the digital age.
A strategic approach to infrastructure resilience
Huawei’s commitment to building a resilient infrastructure lies at the heart of its mission to provide exceptional financial services. As the financial landscape continues to evolve rapidly, with an increasing focus on uninterrupted accessibility and universal availability, the significance of infrastructure becomes more prominent.
Over time, the finance industry has undergone remarkable changes, shifting from in-person branch services to scenario-based finance, from conventional to distributed cores, and from manual operations to AI-driven decision-making.
These transformations highlight the escalating importance of a sturdy and reliable infrastructure for the efficient and secure delivery of services.
A pivotal component of the company’s strategy for resilient infrastructure involves the progressive evolution of financial services from a traditional host architecture to a cloud-native containerised architecture.
This evolutionary journey extends towards a hybrid multi-cloud model, ultimately meeting the heightened demands for multi-cloud management and achieving seamless cloud-network collaboration across multiple active centres. Service resilience is fortified through these advancements, ensuring uninterrupted operations even in the face of challenges.
Huawei MEGA infrastructure: A solution to modern challenges
At the core of Huawei’s strategic vision for resilient infrastructure lies its MEGA infrastructure. The MEGA infrastructure incorporates four core principles – Multi-DC-as-a-Computer, E2E experience, Green, and Autonomous – each element contributing to user experience, service resilience, and service security.
The MEGA infrastructure is not limited to a single system but extends its reach across multiple domains. By harnessing the peer-to-peer computing power of CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs, the multi-active centres operate with the efficiency of a single computer.
E2E experience is another crucial component, including adopting measures such as one-hop access to the cloud and multi-active DR for zero service interruption.
By implementing SRv6 services for one-hop access to the cloud and multi-active DR for uninterrupted service, Huawei is making significant strides in enhancing user experience.
Regarding green technology, the company employs new architectures, materials, and algorithms to support a low-carbon infrastructure that aligns with global sustainability goals.
Lastly, autonomy represents the final piece of the MEGA puzzle. With an emphasis on intelligence, Huawei’s infrastructure utilises digital maps to detect, locate, and solve problems in a streamlined fashion, significantly improving operational efficiency.
Synergising: modernization, data, and innovation
Based on MEGA infrastructure, Huawei is accelerating application modernisation using a “platform + service” model, recognising its centrality in attaining business agility.
The company emphasises creating a resilient, multi-active, secure, and compliant basic platform, which catalyses application modernization by accommodating atomic business capabilities such as funds and accounts through a service-oriented architecture.
This coupling of high and low code methods allows Huawei to deliver composable services, facilitating the introduction of personalized products and services into the scenario ecosystem.
In addition, Huawei fosters an environment for enhanced data-driven decision-making, acknowledging the significant volume of data held within financial institutions and the necessity to optimize its utility. Huawei’s data value elevation strategy encompasses a transition from operation to data, data to information, information to knowledge, and knowledge to action.
The company champions incorporating data intelligence capabilities across five facets: data architecture, data governance, data consumption, data security, and data talent, leveraging AI for productivity enhancement and effective decision-making. This strategy permits financial institutions to glean refined customer insights and maximize their data value.
Furthermore, Huawei highlights the importance of scenario innovation in digital finance, focusing on specific cases such as cold chain, bulk commodity, dry bulk, and standard product scenarios.
By amalgamating diverse advanced technologies, the company constructs an industry digital financial platform fortified with device-edge-cloud intelligence to surmount real-time management and control hurdles in production financing and production.
Huawei considers the crux of intensifying digital industry finance to be the establishment of three-dimensional trustworthiness: trusted supervision, credible ownership, and trusted value, and it employs cutting-edge technologies to achieve these facets of reliability.
Huawei MEGA Success Stories
The robustness and efficiency of MEGA infrastructure can be better understood from successful implementations that Huawei has carried out for Thailand’s Government Savings Bank (GSB) and Itaú Bank.
GSB, Thailand’s first state-owned bank, embarked on a digital transformation journey to meet the evolving demands of its customers. By leveraging Huawei’s SD-WAN (Software-Defined Networking in a Wide Area Network) Solution, GSB improved operational efficiency, reduced O&M costs, and enhanced the user experience across its over 1,000 branches.
The SD-WAN Solution provided intelligent ultra-broadband and on-demand interconnection, zero-touch configuration, smart O&M, and excellent full-service experience. These features enabled GSB to accelerate service rollout, ensure smooth operations, and prepare for future network expansion.
Itaú Bank, the largest bank in Latin America operating in over 20 countries, faced the challenge of accommodating a surge in remote work during the COVID-19 pandemic. The bank’s legacy storage systems in its two data centres, built in 2014, were strained, with a limited capacity of 36.9 PB and high maintenance costs.
Huawei’s solution, identified through Proof of Concept (PoC) tests, offered stable storage performance with RAID-TP technology, enabling concurrent failures of three disks without service interruptions.
Implementing Huawei’s OceanStor All-Flash Arrays (AFAs) resulted in a 45 percent reduction in power consumption and a 65 percent decrease in maintenance costs.
With Huawei’s storage solution in place, Itaú Bank was able to ensure stability and reliability in its storage infrastructure, meeting the increased demand for online banking services during the pandemic while optimizing costs and enhancing operational efficiency.
The future of resilient infrastructure
In the rapidly evolving financial services industry, MEGA embodies the future of resilient infrastructure from Huawei, addressing the multi-faceted challenges posed by performance, availability, security, O&M, and energy consumption.
Through MEGA, Huawei is well-positioned to meet the industry’s ever-changing needs, offering an all-in-one solution that combines service resilience with state-of-the-art infrastructure technology.
Building upon this momentum and fostering the spirit of innovation within the financial sector, the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit 2023 took center stage on June 7 to 8 in Shanghai, China. The summit was an opportunity for industry leaders to share their insights on digital trends for the future of finance and present successful cases. For more details, please click here.