Huawei introduces five new capabilities of the Cloud Network Solution

At MWC Shanghai 2021, Kevin Hu, President of Huawei Data Communication Product Line, announced the “five ones” new capabilities of the Intelligent cloud network solution. This solution helps carriers build cloud-oriented service networks and core capabilities for DICT transformation.

• One hop to cloud
• One-network wide connection
• One-click fast scheduling
• One fiber for multiple purposes
• One-stop integrated security

According to Kevin Hu, the cloud network is the key enabler in the digital economy, bringing new impetus for the fourth industrial revolution. The cloud network provides continuous computing power for numerous industries, stimulating new growth in the digital economy.

The digital transformation of many industries positions DICT as a driver for carrier growth in the digital economy era. The total available market (TAM) growth rate of DICT, taking Chinese carriers as an example, has reached 40%.

Carriers adopt the DICT strategy to meet the digital transformation demands of their industry customers and the new opportunities are accompanied by new changes and challenges.

Change 1: Cloud access demands are increasing rapidly. 93% of enterprises will use public clouds, and 74% of enterprises will use hybrid clouds. Enterprises have demands for multi-cloud connection through single-point access.

Change 2: Enterprise private lines are shifting to cloud private networks. After enterprise service systems are cloudified, the enterprise needs to transform from private lines to globally reachable cloud private networks.

Change 3: Best-effort forwarding is shifting to experience assurance. The cloudification of enterprise production systems means that networks need to change from best-effort forwarding to deterministic experience assurance.

Change 4: Single-point security is shifting to all-round protection. To meet service cloudification requirements, security needs to change from single-point protection provided by firewalls to E2E (from devices, networks, and clouds to applications) security collaboration and all-round protection capabilities.

These changes bring new challenges to networks such as Integrated cloud-network scheduling needs to be provided to enterprises to implement one-stop subscription to cloud-network products and provide e-commerce-like service experience. Enterprises also require a consistent cloud and network experience. In addition, production system cloudification requires the networks to provide E2E SLA assurance. Finally, as more and more data enters clouds, the original physical security boundaries are broken — the digital world requires collaboration among enterprises, networks, and clouds for security protection.

Huawei’s intelligent cloud network solution, through its five-ones new capabilities (one hop to cloud, one-network wide connection, one-click fast scheduling, one fiber for multiple purposes, and one-stop integrated security), maximizes the value of carriers’ network resources and fully leverages the complementary advantages of clouds and networks. As such, it is the key for carriers to provide DICT services integrating clouds and networks.

One hop to the cloud: Cloud access paths enable cloud access within minutes

The cloud backbone provides flexible connections between multiple clouds and networks while SRv6-based cloud access paths streamline cross-domain connections. With technology breaking process barriers, experience on clouds and networks becomes consistent, and service access to clouds through one network can be implemented within minutes.

One-network-wide connection: Network-as-a-service delivers cloud-like network usage.

The service-oriented network architecture provides tenant-level interfaces to shield network implementation details. This reduces the system integration time by 90%, enabling enterprises to use networks as conveniently as using clouds. Furthermore, with iMaster NCE’s intelligent distributed path computation, the scale of network connections reaches 100 times greater than the industry average, meeting the demands for ultra-large-scale networking and global interconnection of numerous tenants.

One-click fast scheduling: The intelligent cloud graph algorithm improves IDC resource utilization by 30%.

The intelligent cloud graph algorithm, combining network and cloud factors, provides optimal cloud access paths for enterprises and implements integrated scheduling of cloud and network resources. This improves the cloud and network resource utilization by 30%.

One fiber for multiple purposes: Hierarchical slicing provides a deterministic service experience for numerous industries.

On the enterprise side, the intelligent cloud terminal — a box-shaped device — provides access to multiple services requiring different SLAs, such as CCTV, office Internet access, and remote conferencing. On the network side, one fiber to different slice-based service private networks provides fine-granularity experience assurance.

One-stop integrated security: The QIANKUN security cloud service builds all-round security protection.

Working with TianGuan enterprise-side security gateways, the QIANKUN security cloud service builds all-round defense capabilities that feature cloud-network-security integration. This helps achieve a 96% detection rate for new threats, detection of hidden attacks within minutes, near-source blocking of threats related to cloud-network security integration, cloud-based deployment of atomic security capabilities, and cloud-based O&M and security services in subscription mode.

To date, Huawei has carried out joint cloud network innovation and commercial use with more than 30 carriers, serving digitalization scenarios, covering government, healthcare, education, finance, mining, port, iron and steel, and electric power industries. Looking ahead, Huawei will continue to innovate based on IPv6+ technologies and refine the intelligent cloud network solution to help carriers explore the business value of connections, build new business models, and accelerate the digital transformation of industries.