In 2022, a highly connected and intelligent world is no longer an idea, but it has become a reality. Today, ICT is being applied in various industries, empowering digital and intelligent transformation and improving human lives. With the arrival of this highly connected and intelligent world, networks are also entering a new development stage.
Reshaping future networksÂ
The network of the future is autonomous. Traditional networks are unable to keep pace with the evolving demands of the digital era. The cumbersome manual processes needed to manage such networks are the main bottleneck in most IT operations, hampering digital transformation and service delivery. Additionally, the labour-intensive processes required for manual O&M slow down operations while adding costs.
The solution is an autonomous network that uses AI and machine learning algorithms to create a responsive, adaptive, and predictive infrastructure. These intelligent networks significantly speed up operations, allowing companies to focus their efforts on business objectives rather than just keeping the lights on.
At the recent Huawei Middle East IP Club Carnival 2022, global and regional experts gathered to discuss the latest network technology trends and deliberate on how enterprises could prepare for the intelligent era with the help of next-generation networks powered by machine learning and AI capabilities.
Now is the time to build autonomous driving networks
An example is Huawei’s Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) solution for data centres, which allows enterprises to deploy a network ready for any level of service deployment, simulate the intent of network manager using Digital Twins and provide proactive O&M for very complex data centres network environments.
Autonomous Driving Networks (ADNs) aim to achieve automation, self-healing, self-optimisation, and autonomy, and their four most prominent features are advanced intelligent sensing, digital mapping, self-learning, and adaptive decision making. Thanks to the network’s high level of automation and intelligence, automatic network-healing can be achieved to ensure a highly stable network, automatic configuration can be realised for efficient network operations, and automatic optimisation can be attained to deliver a superior user experience.
“Digitalisation creates additional opportunities for economic growth,” says Huawei Cloud president
But enterprises still require migrating to intelligent data centres. This is a complex process where unwanted downtime, data loss, data security and other challenges may impact service delivery and add expenditure. Huawei has solved this challenge with the industry’s first autonomous network management and control system iMaster NCE. This system integrates management, control, and analysis to ensure a smooth transition from the SDN era to the ADN era.
Cloud-network synergy for ubiquitous intelligence
This same intelligence can be extended to campus environments to enable networks to keep pace with the cloud, vastly improving efficiency. In the education sector, for example, a smart campus allows for AR, VR, and other interactive teaching tools without lag or disruption. It also enables administrators to access intelligent teaching insights that can help improve learning outcomes.
At the same time, different locations need to be able to exchange information with each other through a reliable WAN solution and this is where SD-WAN comes into play and both Campus and SD-WAN can be managed from one single management platform. SD-WAN is able to identify applications, steer and load balance applications intelligently as well as optimise video over the WAN by using technologies like A-FEC and replication. This way, even when the connection is losing packets, it will have no impact even up to 30 percent packet loss.
Future networks need to be cloud-native, connecting enterprises, homes, individuals and machines to the cloud, integrating the digital world with the physical world and enabling connectivity from anywhere and at any time. So, cloud-network synergy is becoming essential for providing ubiquitous intelligence and meeting the demand for flexibility, manageability, scalability, security, efficiency and cost-effectiveness.
At the recent IP Club Carnival, we launched three new intelligent cloud-network solutions: CloudFabric 3.0, Huawei’s SD-WAN Solution and CloudCampus 3.0 Solution. As enterprise digital transformation picks up speed, IP networks need to keep pace with the evolving cloud technologies. Our new solutions aim to address these challenges and we are committed to relentless efforts to develop scenario-tailored solutions for partners and customers, creating new drivers for digitalisation across industries.
A trusted partner for digital transformation across industries
To date, Huawei’s Intelligent Cloud-Network Solution has served customers in education, transportation, finance, energy, and other industries in more than 140 countries and regions.
Furthermore, in order to showcase and jointly develop the industry’s best solutions for our customers, Huawei has built a state-of-the-art datacom innovation lab and OpenLab, as well as 7 executive briefing centres across the Middle East. Through these labs, Huawei encourages joint solution development and verification and training for customers and partners.
Talent remains a crucial driver of the Middle East’s digital transformation journey. Huawei wants to support the shift to the intelligent era through skills development with the ‘IP Talent Strategy’, which aims to nurture ICT talent amongst the region’s growing community of IP networking professionals.
We truly believe that ICT will be a key driver for the sustainable and green development of society at large. We develop network solutions for green sites, networks, and network operations, as well as more efficient and low-carbon energy solutions. We are also working with our ecosystem partners to deploy more energy-efficient ICT infrastructure. Together, we want to make ubiquitous connectivity a greener possibility in the future.
In the end, digital transformation is a long journey with plenty of challenges. However, the shift from costly, labour-intensive traditional networks to agile and intelligent architectures is inevitable. By injecting intelligence into networks, AI is not only an enabler of business transformation but will give impetus to industry-wide digitalisation strategies and, more broadly, power Middle East countries’ ambitious national digital transformation plans.
