Embrace innovative ICT to 'go cloud'

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In Unzipping the Digital World, Keith Willetts, founder and former chairman and CEO of TD Forum, the global industry association for digital business, stated: "The digital world offers fantastic and unprecedented opportunities - but they won't fall into your lap. Most established players have been slow to grasp them and even slower at understanding the threats inaction will bring. We must bear in mind that, in the digital world, we cannot simply exploit new incremental business using traditional business models. Rather, we need to create new business models and services."

What are players in the new digital economies doing to seize this historic opportunity? Who are embracing the new technologies and business models with the most enthusiasm? Who are taking a 'wait and see' position? Individuals, businesses, and governments have many choices to make.

During the transformation, the connectivity bridge between the real and digital economies will exert a far-reaching impact on human productivity and lifestyles. The effects of ubiquitous connectivity to the internet are plain to see and, by 2025, Huawei projects that 100 billion devices will be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT). A fully connected world will be bursting with opportunities for new businesses and new wealth.

Cloud computing is the driving force

Cloud computing has become the platform-of-choice for providing the wide range of applications which are necessary to manage our national economies, industrial infrastructure, and consumer services. We have all come to rely on the cloud to live and work comfortably. An important engine driving the transformation of traditional industries, cloud computing offers utility-scale computational power for generating the digital assets that are further leveraged by big data and IoT applications. The new standard for enterprise IT, cloud computing will increasingly dominate all aspects of manufacturing and production.

Building cloud ecosystems

In the digital economy, no single company can serve all customers in an industry. As an ICT solutions provider with a global vision, Huawei is committed to creating new solutions with partners and customers to power the changes in industries. Over the past four years, Huawei has massively expanded its public, private, and hybrid cloud computing business by working closely with our partners and customers on their ICT transformations. In particular, we have made great progress in the financial, urban government, media production, enterprise campus, and software development markets.

• The financial industry is suffering from the double shock of competing internet financial services and the revolution of big data-rich cloud computing. To reclaim their leadership position, the financial industry must provide financial services that meet the demands of the internet generation for promptness, reliability, and precision, and build IT systems able to dynamically allocate resources to match real-time changes in business volume. It is essential that the industry find effective ways to mine the massive volume of data it generates, as the leverage of these big data pools is at the heart of creating new value for marketing and services.

• New thinking is required to create service-oriented government resources able to support a culture of innovation at the local, regional, and national levels. How best for governments to harness new information technologies to achieve these deep levels of transformation and greater convenience for their citizens? What are the best practices for government agencies to collect and share information? How can government agencies simplify complicated bureaucracies while meeting all requirements for ensuring security and compliance? These are all common questions facing government officials and their IT service providers, today.

• For consumers, digital content over mobile broadband and social media are spreading like wildfire. Inside and outside of the media industry, the result is an unprecedented disruption in the viewing habits and levels of user input from the commercial audience - all of which is having a major impact on operations, production, and content processing for the service providers. The bar continues to rise for high-availability computing, mass storage, and broadband connectivity as users pursue ever-higher quality content, especially as it relates to 4K and 8K video.