Global digital transformation has reached a new stage of full intelligence driven by data and artificial intelligence (AI), said Huawei Hybrid Cloud VP Hu Yuhai.

With this shift from moving applications to various clouds to data- and AI-driven industry intelligence, Huawei, at the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, released its National Cloud 2.0 solution to assist government organisations worldwide in accelerating national digital transformations and promote intelligence.

"The National Cloud 2.0 solution from Huawei provides trusted cloud infrastructure, innovative cloud services and extensive industry know-how. We aim to help governments achieve national digital visions faster," he said.

Currently, more than 170 countries and regions have announced digital transformation strategies and innovative technologies, including AI models, are experiencing more widespread adoption.

The digital transformation of government customers is reaching a new stage as they seek out ways of leveraging digital and intelligent technologies to empower smart city governance, better government services and greater economic growth.

Huawei's National Cloud 2.0 is powered by hybrid cloud solution Huawei Cloud Stack, which continuously synchronises cloud services from the Huawei public cloud while being deployed on-premises.

The solution, which shares the same ecosystem with the Huawei public cloud, enables government customers to leverage the solutions' four innovative capabilities to build national clouds, including secure and reliable cloud native infrastructure; Pangu models for one-stop creation of tailored AI models; a converged data lake that promotes data sharing; and a distributed cloud database with high performance and availability.

Through Huawei Cloud Stack's secure and reliable cloud native infrastructure, which provides high availability for cloud services, applications can achieve intra-city and remote disaster recovery without being rearchitected, while SecMaster and a broad set of security services help government customers meet compliance, Yuhai outlined.

Huawei Cloud Stack has an open ecosystem compatible with mainstream hardware and operating systems, as well as third-party applications, and is the first hybrid cloud that can be used to deploy AI models, providing the most complete AI production chain in the industry, he said.

Huawei Cloud Stack supports cross-cloud training and multi-cloud deployment of AI models and provides many industry-specific solutions to help governments build their own AI models.

According to Yuhai, the platform, which uses FusionInsight MRS to establish an integrated big data platform, improves data governance efficiency ten-fold, enables real-time import of government data into lakes and promotes cross-source, cross-domain, cross-warehouse collaboration, which will improve the analysis efficiency 50-fold.

Meanwhile, distributed cloud database Huawei Cloud GaussDB leverages a range of new technologies to provide high availability, security, performance, scalability and intelligence, offering an easy deployment and allowing for a smooth data migration from other databases.

Huawei Cloud Stack currently serves more than 5 200 government and enterprise customers around the world and more than 20 national and regional governments have partnered with Huawei to build national clouds and accelerate national digital transformation.

Yuhai pointed to Egypt's NAS Cloud's deployment of a national data centre and national DRaaS and Al innovation platforms, enhancing data security, promoting data sharing and elevating government services, as they aim to create fully connected, intelligent government services for Egypt.

In addition, National Telecom Public Company, in Thailand, also established a national cloud using Huawei Cloud Stack, providing extensive cloud services for multiple government organisations in Thailand.

Uzbekistan deployed a secure, reliable national cloud using Huawei Cloud Stack to provide a nationwide e-government system and multi-level virtual data centres to match the organisational structure of Uzbekistan ministries.

*Natasha Odendaal is a guest of Huawei at the Mobile World Congress 2024, being held in Barcelona, Spain, from February 26 to 29.