The Core Concerns for Government and Enterprise Cloud Users in the Emerging Asia-Pacific Region Mainly Focus on Cloud Service Convenience, Diversity, And Security

As 5G, AI, big data, and the industrial Internet lead a new round of changes in information technology, the era of digital economy is unstoppable. "Going to cloud" and building IT architecture on the cloud have become an inevitable choice for more and more enterprises. Furthermore, government and enterprise users, the main users of cloud in the emerging Asia-Pacific region, have very consistent needs that could be served by the characteristics of hybrid cloud. This group of users is accelerating their digital transformation, enjoying economy of scale, and is interested in deploying public cloud to make their IT resources agile and flexible so as to response business needs promptly and to meet the requirement for data privatization, controllability, and security. Hybrid clouds that can synchronize high-end services such as databases, big data and AI analytics have become an important instrument for government and enterprise users in the emerging Asia-Pacific region to migrate to the cloud. 

For government and enterprise users in the emerging Asia-Pacific region, the agile governance, security, service richness, disaster recovery capabilities, ecological capabilities, and resale feasibility of hybrid cloud are the core focus. First of all, in terms of balancing agility and governance, as the business develops, a single data center faces performance bottlenecks, single-point risks, overload caused by large-scale business traffic, etc., which is not conducive to the balanced development of the business. Therefore, government and enterprise users hope to develop multi-cloud and utilize multiple available data centers to share data traffic, improve performance, and reduce single-point risks. In addition, government and enterprise users hope that cloud computing products can have multi-data center and multi-cloud management capabilities that can adapt to the multi-level management architecture of government and enterprises, and provide unified multi-cloud management capabilities. Secondly, emerging Asia-Pacific government and enterprise users are concerned about the security of cloud services, including data privacy and compliance, security and protection, compliance supervision, and disaster recovery. For example, government and enterprise users need to meet data security and compliance issues when handling large amounts of sensitive data, including customer information, financial data, and strategic plans, which requires cloud service providers to ensure that their data is not abused, leaked, or stolen. For example, uses can store sensitive financial or customer information on a private cloud and use the public cloud to run the rest of their enterprise applications by segregating critical workloads from less sensitive workloads. At the same time, multinational companies operating in the emerging Asia-Pacific region usually rely on the security compliance expertise of cloud vendors and data security regulatory consulting services to mitigate risks caused by unfamiliarity with the local policies environment when entering the market.

In addition, in terms of service richness, government and enterprise users want to use easily scalable public clouds to handle dynamic workloads, while leaving more stable and more sensitive workloads to private clouds or internal data centers. They also need to make long-term investment and build technology accumulation in perfecting cloud deployment by integrating cloud services from public clouds and local data centers, so that private clouds have the ability to evolve. Users pay attention to the operation and maintenance capabilities of cloud vendors to achieve cloud computing stability, security, and performance assurance.

Furthermore, in terms of reliability and disaster recovery, users are concerned about whether cloud vendors have multi-cloud and cross-cloud disaster recovery and backup capabilities to meet the needs of business deployment, data protection and management; and reduce the chance of their own application transformation. This requires cloud vendors to further consider the design of an evolvable disaster recovery architecture when designing cloud-native disaster recovery solutions. In terms of ecological capabilities, users hope that cloud services can support a wide range of ISV applications and inherit the rich applications on the public cloud; container technology can become a common language and an ecological link of open architecture in a hybrid cloud environment, bringing together enterprises, customers, and suppliers by connecting suppliers and partners into an infinitely scalable and innovative ecosystem, so it is highly welcomed by customers. In terms of resale feasibility, customers value cloud services that can support unified management and governance for self-use and resale, helping them achieve resale value conversion. They also have requirements for flexible deployment of hybrid clouds, rapid resource application and issuance, and secure resource isolation. Capabilities to meet the demands of B2B scenarios for cloud operations and maintenance, enable governments and enterprises to explore new business models and increase user loyalty.

Furthermore, having comprehensive leading product and technology strength, a mature ecosystem, and good customer service are the main characteristics of leading hybrid cloud vendors. From a product and technology perspective, hybrid cloud vendors need to excel in basic performance, data security compliance, product strength, and technological innovation. Leading hybrid cloud vendors need to have basic capabilities such as physical compatibility, cloud-edge collaboration, expansion iteration, and cloud-network integration, as well as powerful computing performance, storage performance, and transmission performance, such as the elastic scheduling and scalability of hybrid clouds. In terms of security compliance, leading hybrid cloud vendors focus on security and provide advanced security measures such as advanced threat detection, data encryption, authentication, and access control functions, such as using encryption protocols to encrypt data transmission and data storage. In addition, it has network and application security functions such as border physical firewalls, border IPS intrusion prevention systems, IDS advanced threat detection, and vulnerability scanning. In terms of product strength, vendors need to have cloud-native application development and deployment capabilities, and rich and advanced applications. In terms of technological innovation, it is necessary to develop and apply cutting-edge technologies such as distributed storage, containers, AI, and cloud native. A mature ecosystem is also one of the essential characteristics of leading hybrid cloud vendors. The cloud computing business model highly integrates the IT industry. To provide the ultimate user experience, hybrid cloud service providers will make deep adaptations in advance at the product level with underlying software and hardware partners, security tools vendors, and application software vendors. The IT ecosystem in which hybrid cloud vendors are operating, cloud ecosystem maturity will become their core competitiveness. Excellent customer service is also very important for hybrid cloud vendors. Vendors need to evaluate the ability of hybrid cloud services to innovatively solve the pain points of different application scenarios, as well as to design and implement customized application solutions, and to share industry know-how. They also need to help customers operate and manage cloud environments, improve customers' cloud experience, and quickly locate and solve IT problems.

Overall, Frost & Sullivan believes that Huawei's hybrid cloud has the core characteristics of a high-quality hybrid cloud vendor. Its leading technology, efficient and intelligent, safe, and reliable hybrid cloud services have been widely used in many regions and industries. On the one hand, Huawei's hybrid cloud has a very high level of product and technology strength. Huawei's hybrid cloud disaster recovery solution can provide customers with multi-cloud and cross-cloud disaster recovery and backup capabilities to meet the comprehensive strategy of enterprise business deployment, data protection, and management, and achieve the basic guarantees of "multi-cloud backup and cloud disaster recovery" so as effectively improve business continuity and ensure the safety of critical business data. Huawei Cloud Stack is deployed in the customer data center and can use all the rich services of the private cloud off the Internet. Customers have absolute control over data sovereignty, operation, and maintenance. At the same time, based on the unified architecture of the public cloud and private cloud, Huawei Cloud can help offline private cloud users enjoy services from both sides in the hybrid cloud model enjoying innovative services from the public cloud. On the other hand, Huawei's hybrid cloud has independent innovation capabilities and a complete ecosystem. Based on its independently developed Kunpeng series chips, Huawei provides TaiShan servers and Kunpeng cloud services. At the same time, Huawei provides complete code migration, optimization, acceleration, compilation tools, and operating environments. Cooperating with major open source communities, realizing the support of basic software and middleware for Kunpeng, making it convenient for developers to make application development and application migration. In terms of customer service, thanks to Huawei's years of experience in serving governments and enterprises, it can provide mature government and enterprise customer service processes and localized implementation, and quickly respond to customer needs; at the same time, it provides scenario-based solutions through professional services to help customers build, utilized and manage cloud services.