November 8, 2018, was China's 19th Journalists' Day.
A great success story between the Xinhua News Agency and HUAWEI CLOUD was widely broadcasted and forwarded on social media on this day as a salute to journalists.
Xinhua News Agency, China's official state-run news agency and the country's principal and most influential agency, is the largest news agency in the world in terms of correspondents worldwide. Xinhua is the sole channel for the distribution of important news related to the Communist Party and Chinese central government. Despite its size and importance, overseas branches of Xinhua have often suffered from slow download speeds and frequent disconnections. Inefficient maintenance and troubleshooting make matters even worse. In addition, the agency had to simultaneously ensure compliance with the laws and regulations of numerous countries.
HUAWEI CLOUD now provides stable cloud services to support the news distribution system of Xinhua and has won high acclaim from the agency for its cutting-edge technologies and future-oriented approach. This success story takes on even greater significance with HUAWEI CLOUD now expanding globally.
Pain Points and Requirements of the News distribution System
Xinhua News Agency's news distribution platform connects to global news agencies and forwards news to its partner companies. For example, Sina, China's leading multi-platform digital media company, downloads up-to-date news from Xinhua's news distribution platform.
Xinhua employs their news distribution system in both their headquarters and branches. Headquarters has a large equipment room and a professional technical team, making it relatively easy to purchase and set up servers. This is not, however, an easy task for global branches due to their locations and resource limitations.
Previously, each branch of Xinhua built their own mini news distribution system in a small equipment room with several servers. In spite of the small size, maintaining these systems required two or three full-time engineers, resulting in high costs. Partner companies often encountered problems downloading news reports from the news distribution system, compromising the timeliness of breaking news.
Upgrading the branches' news distribution systems did not efficiently solve these problems. Because the branches are located globally, equipment installation, deployment, and O&M for all branches required extensive IT workload and resulted in high costs. If many branches require a future upgrade, the news agency would have no choice but to start over by purchasing new equipment, planning new lines, and building new systems, and no one knows when the next upgrade will be necessary.
The cloud computing business model revolutionizes Xinhua's construction and O&M on news distribution systems at their branches. With cloud services, the news agency no longer needs to purchase, install, or deploy devices. What’s more, they won’t need full-time maintenance personnel, allowing them to focus on customer development for their branches.
To deal with these issues, Xinhua established the public cloud service procurement project, which includes an omnimedia distribution and e-commerce platform, and is one of the key projects in the media convergence development of Xinhua. Ultimately, Xinhua hopes to provide the most up-to-date news for branches by improving the speed of their sites.
Escorting Enterprises' Expansion Outside of China
Xinhua was not initially optimistic towards the low-profile HUAWEI CLOUD, but after several rounds of evaluation on the products, technologies, and services, Xinhua ultimately gave the bid to HUAWEI CLOUD, citing its leading technologies and professional support services.
HUAWEI CLOUD has more cloud nodes outside of China than other Chinese cloud service providers and fully meets all requirements. Additionally, while Huawei is a global business, it also provides unrivaled local services. Beyond this, Huawei's extensive experience as a telecommunications device vendor provides HUAWEI CLOUD with a competitive edge that enhances the news broadcasting of Xinhua.
Xinhua News Agency has three core systems: collection, editing, and distribution systems. The first two systems are used by journalists and editors. The distribution system connects to global media and its performance defines the external response speed, and ultimately the experience of news consumers.
In the first phase of establishing the omnichannel distribution platform, HUAWEI CLOUD focused on optimizing the news distribution lines and building an integrated, intelligent, and interactive omnichannel distribution platform to meet changing market requirements and improve the customer experience.
The global news distribution system of Xinhua now consists of the primary node in Beijing and public cloud service nodes at branches outside China. HUAWEI CLOUD provides a full portfolio of products, including private lines between the primary node and the branch nodes.
Chinese enterprises and their global institutions face several issues in their global expansion. Network resources often cannot be quickly obtained due to long distances between nodes. The bandwidth cannot be allocated on demand, resulting in high and wasteful expenditures. Network resources are particularly difficult to obtain in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and enterprises also find it difficult to meet the laws and regulations in each country they operate in.
HUAWEI CLOUD provides the Cloud Connect service to help enterprises flexibly expand their global business. The Cloud Connect service ensures one-stop compliance globally, allowing users to focus on their own service innovation. In addition, the service includes an intelligent 'brain' (named Galaxy), providing scheduling capabilities. It enables millions of users to easily interconnect with each other at more than tripling speed.
Around-the-Clock Online Services
Of course, the cutting-edge technologies and professional services of HUAWEI CLOUD are important, but security is a vital issue for Xinhua's news distribution platform. Special measures must be taken to prevent tampering with or stealing news reports. Stolen news reports result in profit losses, and news report tampering leads to serious consequences.
As a leading public cloud service provider, HUAWEI CLOUD provides full-stack security protection for Xinhua's news distribution platform. HUAWEI CLOUD is the only cloud service provider in China that has passed the PCI-DSS security certification, and has obtained the Building Security In Maturity Model (BSIMM) certification, Information Technology Service Standards (ITSS) service enhancement certification, IDC/ISP license, and Trusted Cloud certification (TUV).
Adhering to the principles of never developing apps, never touching customer data, and never taking equity stakes in partners, HUAWEI CLOUD makes its business boundaries clear and will not intercept customers' private information, fully protecting customers' rights and interests.
HUAWEI has local service teams in more than 170 countries and regions that can provide 24/7 response to address the requirements of Xinhua, exactly what the global news agency requires.
Switching from the original business model to public cloud is considered the core part of the upgrade of the news distribution platform. With the help of HUAWEI CLOUD, the news distribution system of the headquarters and branches were migrated to run on HUAWEI CLOUD within one month. Previously, the migrations took at least one or two years.
Data migration is complex and successful migration speaks to the close collaboration between Xinhua and HUAWEI CLOUD. The technical team of Xinhua transferred the application data and applications to HUAWEI CLOUD, which then installed and deployed the apps. During the migration of the Singapore node (the most important node of Xinhua), HUAWEI CLOUD dispatched a database expert to work with the technical team of Xinhua specifically on optimization and data transmission. Xinhua was impressed with the professional services of HUAWEI CLOUD.
Which cloud services provider dedicates itself to your future? HUAWEI CLOUD answers that question with the way it does business.
