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Cloud computing is increasingly becoming a fact of life for all enterprises, not just for the IT organisation, and cloud is now a business platform more than just a technology solution, involving and affecting people, processes and applications.
And, today, organisations of all types and sizes are embracing digital transformation as an essential, strategic business imperative.
As small to medium enterprise (SMEs) comprise almost 99% of total business establishments in Malaysia, they are the key driver of employment and economic growth, so it is important to enable Malaysian SMEs to move towards digitalisation to continue accelerating the Digital Economy.
The COVID-19 pandemic, especially in 2020 and 2021, had on the one hand greatly disrupted the operation of many business and industries in Malaysia, with many of them having to close, whist on the other hand, those which were able to transform their operations by embracing digitalisation managed to survive, emerged from the difficult times and even thrive as digital industry innovation with cloud services is transforming enterprises, without which businesses will be left behind.
Cloud infrastructures also support environmental proactivity, powering virtual services rather than physical products and hardware, and cutting down on paper waste, improving energy efficiency, and allows employees access to the services from anywhere with an internet connection, thus reducing commute-time and environmentally-related emissions.
As small to medium enterprise (SMEs) comprise almost 99% of total business establishments in Malaysia, they are the key driver of employment and economic growth, so it is important to enable Malaysian SMEs to move towards digitalisation to continue accelerating the Digital Economy.
As cloud computing technologies such as Big Data, Big Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have gradually evolved in recent years, commercial enterprises such as chain stores, chain hotels, SMEs and multi-branch enterprises are moving towards digital transformation, whilst at the same time face many challenges.
H3C’s new generation of Cloudnet Solution, is upgraded from its earlier network-based cloud management version to end-to-end integrated management for Information and Communications Technology (ICT). It now enables SMEs to reduce their ICT hardware, software licensing, operational and maintenance costs, which allows them to focus more on their business development and growth.
Rockies Ma, H3C Malaysia General Manager
“From our experience, most of our customers reported saving more than 70% on equipment and management costs per year by using our Cloudnet Solution managed services platform”, said Rockies Ma, H3C Malaysia General Manager.
Cloud computing products and services
Overview of CloudOS by H3C
H3C’s CloudOS is a full-stack cloud platform which converges AI, Big Data, and Internet of Things (IoT), with the capability to meet all the needs of different scenarios in various industries.
H3C’s CAS (Cloud Automation System) is a self-developed virtualisation platform for the next generation of cloud data centres.
H3C’s UIS Hyper Converged Infrastructure is the new generation of cloud data centre infrastructure solutions.
H3C’s ONEStor 3.0 is software-defined storage (SDS) that separates storage software from its hardware. Unlike traditional network-attached storage (NAS) or storage area network (SAN) systems, ONEStor is generally designed to perform on any industry-standard X86 system, removing the software’s dependence on proprietary hardware.
“SMEs nowadays, especially those in the retail, tourism, hotel and other industries have many geographically dispersed premises including remote offices, and temporary offices, and face many headaches in managing an increasing number of networking devices within their network, which is where our Cloudnet Solution provides them with a very friendly and cost effective platform for them to do their business,” said Ma.
H3C owns, hosts, operates, maintains and manages its Cloudnet Solution platform on its own servers within its data centres and provides it as a managed service directly to its customers anywhere over the Internet, wired or wireless communication infrastructure.
And, like adding pieces of Lego, it can tailor and add modules and features for the platform to suit the specific requirements and business models of particular customers as required, and through managing users remotely at multiple locations such as their many branch offices, temporary offices and so forth.
“From time to time, we add new services and applications to Cloudnet to meet different customer requirements, and if required, we can build applications on top of it for our customer”, said Ma.
H3C owns, hosts, operates, maintains and manages its Cloudnet Solution platform on its own servers within its data centres and provides it as a managed service directly to its customers anywhere over the Internet, wired or wireless communication infrastructure.
“We are also enhancing the AI analytics function in the cloud, so we can better understand our users’ behaviour to greater levels, so we can better serve them, and we can also provide this information to our customers,” Ma added.
In addition to computing, network and storage, with AI, Big Data and IoT technology supported by the Cloudnet, where required at customers’ premises, H3C also bundles networking devices such as switches, routers, WiFi access points, edge servers and so forth and remotely manages its security features such as authentication, firewall, network access control and user behaviour on the platform remotely, and can also include access to web services, such as Microsoft Azure and others to the platform, and these services are evolving as H3C acquires more customers worldwide.
H3C also offers services on its Cloudnet Solution platform through its ecosystem partners (value-added resellers), often with specific industry knowledge and expertise, which can add their own innovative applications to the platform which they then can offer as a service to their end-customers.
“Most importantly, we ensure the data security on our cloud platform for our customers and partners and encrypt their data which is stored securely in our database”, said Ma.
“By enabling our customers to access our Cloudnet platform from anywhere in the world, we enable them to improve their productivity and their flexibility in terms of their workspace, and the transparency of the cloud also provides a very user friendly platform on which they can work collaboratively as a team.
“Also, where needed, our platform also allows third-parties such as our customers’ contractors, suppliers, end-customers and others to work together with together with them on our platform”, Ma added.
Redundancy
Overview of Cloudnet by H3C
The recent sabotage of the undersea Nordstream I and II gas pipelines should be cause for concern about the vulnerability of communications infrastructure connecting data centres and clients, so what redundancy measures does H3C’s Cloudnet have in place to ensure its customers continue to have access to its cloud services in case of such disruption?
Whilst SMEs in may industries are using H3C’s Cloudnet services, however right now, the education, tourism and related hospitality sectors benefit a lot from it.
“Our Open Stack-like open platform provides full redundancy with our CAS platform being a hypervisor which provides clusters of compute, storage and network resources spread across different parts of the world to ensure 24 x 7 non-stop service, where if a connection to one location is disrupted, all traffic will be redirected to another location, provided our customer also has redundant fibre connections”, said Ma.
Whilst SMEs in may industries are using H3C’s Cloudnet services, however right now, the education, tourism and related hospitality sectors benefit a lot from it.
“In education, we have a very good case reference in Universiti Tunku Abdul Rahman (UTAR), which uses our cloud application to manage the WiFi networks in their two different campuses through a very simple graphical user interface (GuI) which we have provided them to manage all the their user assets”, said Ma.
Also, H3C can provide them with some kind of AI, so they can know about any problems, such as users being unable to connect to their network, pending failure in any hardware, with all the information being centrally managed, so they can take proactive measures to to easily fix the problem.
Fierce competition
Overview of Cloudnet by H3C
Also competition amongst hotels is fierce, where guests expect hotels to provide them with WiFi access, and H3C can provide hotels with very stable WiFi service. Hotels also need to ensure that older guests are able to easily connect to its WiFi network without problem, and to be able to know in advance of any possible problems which they could face and address it immediately.
Whilst H3C Cloudnet is easy for SMEs to use due to its friendly and intuitive user interfaces, however, additional customer training is still needed to help SME customers familiarise themselves with and navigate through Cloudnet and the various applications hosted on it, and H3C will closely study each customer to determine their training requirements.
“So Cloudnet can provide all these kinds of advanced features for hotel and their guests, when their build a Wi-Fi network with our cloud layer solutions together with our access points (APs), then we can provide them with complete solutions, from the user authentication to ensure that guests can successfully connect to the network and to Internet services without problem”, said Ma.
Whilst H3C Cloudnet is easy for SMEs to use due to its friendly and intuitive user interfaces, however, additional customer training is still needed to help SME customers familiarise themselves with and navigate through Cloudnet and the various applications hosted on it, and H3C will closely study each customer to determine their training requirements.
“If they are already very technically capable, they can refer to our tutorials and training videos on the Internet and learn by themselves, whilst those who are not technically oriented can refer to our ecosystem partners, whose technical staff we have trained and certified to implement and configure our Cloudnet services, handle their customers’ problems, including user training”, said Ma.
In Part 2, we’ll cover H3C’s introduction of Cloudnet to Malaysia and how they have adapted it to suit the specific domestic Malaysian conditions and how it helps industries, especially SMEs in Malaysia to digitalise.
Charles Moreira was an Editor at Enterprise Trade Views, sister channel to Enterprise IT News. He was a veteran journalist of many years, most well known for his time at The Star's technology pullout.
