Huawei Cloud aims to accelerate digital transformation for local industries over the next five years to support the implementation of South Africa’s National Digital and Cloud Policy and drive growth of the country’s digital economy.

Digital transformation will reshape workflows, business models and how knowledge is leveraged, says Huawei Cloud global marketing and sales service president Jacqueline Shi.

“Huawei Cloud hopes to build a local platform that empowers South Africa and its enterprises. Only when the local ecosystem is sustainable and healthy can the digitisation dream be fully realised,” she says, adding that AI will be a key driver for every kind of industry, and some of those impacts are being seen in South Africa.

Huawei Cloud has been in South Africa since 2019, and in this time its public cloud business has grown more than 16 times, becoming one of the top three cloud providers in the local Internet-as-a-service market.

“Our priority remains driving the digital transformation process. “This will enable inclusive growth and job creation. We also want to reduce poverty and address essential services like healthcare, education, security and e- government,” says Department of Communications and Digital Technologies director-general Nonkqubela Jordan-Dyani.

Public cloud infrastructure will play a crucial role in unlocking growth opportunities, she comments, adding that data sovereignty is a priority for government, with partners like Huawei assisting in ensuring locally-stored data.

While Huawei Cloud solutions are already making a difference in government and other sectors like mining, gaps still need to be bridged for the potential of AI to be realised, Shi continues.

One of the gaps is the lack of strong and organised data, and only once sector- specific solutions are realised can the tools be expanded to impact the whole economy.

“With no cloud, there can be no digitisation,” says Huawei South Africa CEO Will Meng, underscoring the company’s commitment to building localised capabilities and services in South Africa.

Huawei Cloud has invested in data centres over the past five years and deployed three availability zones, while advocating for each country to have its own data sovereignty.

“We supply 15 ms low latency coverage across South Africa and we offer 53 ms low latency coverage across sub-Saharan Africa,” adds Huawei Cloud global solutions and sales president Mark Chen, outlining the successes that the company has achieved in South Africa.

Further, Huawei Cloud Stack 8.5 will be made available in South Africa.

“This new offering will take a hybrid approach and bring advantages of more powerful cloud infrastructure, advanced cloud services and better industry-specific solutions within Huawei’s Cloud Stack,” explains Chen.