Growing Together with a Future-Oriented IT Infrastructure Architecture for Sustainable Success

The telecom industry is at a crossroads. The rich assets of telecom operators, including their data, networks, and applications, offer an unprecedented opportunity to drive value and growth. However, the dynamic and rapidly evolving technological landscape presents daunting challenges for carriers. They must keep pace with the ever-growing data connectivity and services while facing cut-throat competition from new market entrants.

Many carriers are accelerating digital transformation to remain relevant and competitive, and IT infrastructure is core to driving this evolution. Leading industry analysts like IDC and Gartner forecast explosive growth in IT infrastructure investment and cloud-based transformation spending. According to IDC, carriers are expected to see a 17% CAGR in digital transformation expenditure from 2021 to 2025, with IT infrastructure being the second-largest focus area by 2025. Meanwhile, Gartner predicts that carriers worldwide will ramp up their investment in cloud-based transformation at a staggering CAGR of 27% over the next five years. If carriers are not on board with this digital transformation, they risk being left behind.

One of the significant challenges facing carriers as they pursue digital transformation is maximizing the value of their three core assets – data, networks, and applications – in a unified IT infrastructure architecture that is future-oriented. The scale and complexity of these assets pose significant challenges for IT teams in terms of efficiency, reliability, and security. Carriers need information and communications technology (ICT) solutions that help them address the unique requirements of each asset, moving from legacy communications technology (CT) infrastructure to an efficient and agile ICT infrastructure while achieving their digital transformation goals.

Maximizing Value with a Unified IT Architecture Centered on Carriers’ Core Assets

When it comes to data, carriers must store sensitive data locally for security purposes, manage storage resources efficiently, and provision resources with agility. By deploying Huawei’s OneStorage, carriers can build converged storage resource pools oriented to the cloud, local data center, and edge. This improves resource utilization efficiency and accelerates resource provisioning.

For networks, carriers need to accelerate investment monetization, provide differentiated network experiences, schedule network resources flexibly, and provision services quickly. Huawei’s NCE supports the unified scheduling of cloud and network resources, allowing for one-stop provisioning of cloud and network premium packages. The solution helps carriers monetize their network assets and improve end-to-end service-level agreements.

Migrating core telecom applications to the cloud has unique requirements that differ from migrating common services. Core telecom applications require local deployment, low latency, and high reliability, with carriers having full control over such applications. On the other hand, agile applications require agile rollout, fast iteration, and elastic scaling, making deployment on the public cloud the best choice. Huawei’s distributed cloud supports flexible deployment of telecom services on and off the cloud, meeting carriers’ deployment requirements for different applications.

Empowering the Evolution from CT to ICT: Introducing a Future-Oriented IT Infrastructure Architecture

The evolution from CT to ICT will allow carriers to offer innovative and more efficient customer services while remaining competitive and driving growth. However, the journey is not easy. It requires a trusted partner with a vast range of capabilities and expertise and the commitment to grow alongside carriers in their transformation journey.

Huawei is that partner. Unveiled for carriers at MWC 2023, Huawei’s future-oriented IT infrastructure is built around unified data storage and distributed cloud. It offers a range of features and capabilities, including a distributed cloud architecture that spans both on-premises and public cloud environments, a unified storage resource pool with high-performance and massive resource pools. The architecture is designed to serve as the foundation for carriers’ digital transformation and enable the evolution from CT to ICT.

A Cloud-Based Transformation

Cloud technology has become the backbone of IT infrastructure, and carriers must leverage their existing telecom networks to initiate their cloud-based transformation. HUAWEI CLOUD’s distributed cloud enables carriers to transform their internal business operations and increase B2B growth by providing the flexibility, scalability, and agility required in today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.

With the largest number of advanced cloud services deployed locally, the Huawei Stack is the preferred choice for carriers. Huawei is also the only on-premise cloud vendor that reuses installed base storage, further driving value for carriers.

By pre-integrating carriers’ core businesses, the HUAWEI CLOUD enables a rapid and seamless cloud-based transformation. Huawei’s cloud-network solution has helped carriers monetize their networks and increase their B2B growth by over 40%.

Seamless, Secure, and Sustainable Storage

The open data infrastructure architecture supports multiple public and private clouds ，including container technologies, making it multi-cloud-oriented. This feature ensures that the carriers’ investments are protected and saves the hassle of data migration.

With system-level security and reliability, the architecture can achieve zero interruption of core services and zero data loss. Highly reliable equipment and solutions for disaster recovery, backup, and anti-ransomware enhance the system’s security.

The architecture is also energy-saving, utilizing engineering and material innovations alongside data storage optimization algorithms to save 20% of space and reduce energy consumption by 40%.

Collaboration with the Power of Three Dimensions

Huawei’s IT infrastructure architecture for carriers has evolved through CT&IT collaboration, software and hardware collaboration, and online and offline collaboration.

CT&IT collaboration is achieved through pre-integration with Huawei network devices, unified scheduling and management of end-to-end cloud and network resources, and pre-integration with self-owned core telecom applications. This enables better performance, faster rollout, lower costs (reducing the cost of capital by 20% in five years), and easy management with a unified maintenance team.

Online and offline collaboration allows for flexible deployment of applications on and off the cloud, ensuring that users can enjoy a seamless cloud experience regardless of application location.

Local applications can benefit from over 90 cloud services, enabling evolution from on-cloud to in-cloud. Telecom applications have in-depth pre-integration and 30+ function customization.

The architecture also ensures data privacy, enabling sensitive data to be kept locally and core applications to be managed independently and controllably.

Software and hardware collaboration supports hardware decoupling and reusing existing servers, storage, and network devices, which helps protect the carrier’s IT hardware investment.

Accelerating Carriers’ Digital Transformation to Grow Together

Digital transformation requires powerful future-oriented IT infrastructure. With a focus on Distributed cloud-based transformation and multi-cloud-oriented storage infrastructure, Huawei accelerates carriers’ digital transformation and works collaboratively with them to grow together. As a proven ICT provider, Huawei leverages its expertise to provide carriers with the necessary tools to thrive in today’s digital landscape.

Click here to learn more about Huawei’s IT Infrastructure Solutions.

Written by Chen Xuejun, Director of Huawei Carrier IT Marketing & Solution Sales