Huawei Cloud: An Agile, Intelligent, and Resilient Cloud for Smart Finance and FinTechs in Brazil

Apr 22, 2024

Recently, the Huawei Cloud Brazil Finance & FinTech Summit was held in Sao Paulo. The theme was "Accelerating Industry Intelligence with Huawei Cloud". Driven by guiding policies and increasing market demands, financial institutions have embraced the cloud and intelligent transformation and are working with cloud vendors to innovate financial services.

Kevin Gao, the President of Huawei Public Cloud Business Dept, said: "Huawei Cloud is always poised to bring you industry-leading technologies like databases, big data, and cloud native, as well as our best resources and services deployed across 3 AZs and professional services. We are ready to help you take a leap to intelligence. So far, Huawei Cloud serves over 500 financial customers worldwide, including top institutions such as the six largest state-owned banks in China."

Kevin Gao, President of Huawei Public Cloud Business Dept.

The shift from traditional finance to all-scenario finance results in the changes in customer needs – ubiquitous experience, agile services, maximized data value, and a high-availability system.

Alex Zhao, the General Manager of Global Finance for Huawei Public Cloud Business, demonstrated how Huawei Cloud's solutions address these demands. He said that Huawei Cloud is helping financial institutions go digital and intelligent through three innovations. The first is agile innovation, which enables resources to be quickly provisioned and services to be rolled out faster. Huawei Cloud has developed a digital core solution that can handle large-scale high-concurrency services and facilitate agile iteration. With the Mainframe Modernization solution, applications can be migrated automatically, and there is no need for service reconstruction. The second is intelligent innovation, in which big data and AI are used to improve market insights, decision-making, and risk control capabilities，which greatly improves financial service efficiency.. The third innovation is unprecedented resiliency, which ensures the stability, reliability, and security compliance of financial services. For example, a modular multi-region multi-active solution limits the blast radius of faults to a single module. It can achieve 99.999% service availability.

Alex Zhao, General Manager, Global Financial Domain, Huawei Public Cloud Business Dept.

Based on experience serving over 100 top financial customers, Huawei Cloud has identified four key stages of cloud transformation for finance & FinTech: preparation, application migration, data migration, and cloud governance. Huawei Cloud introduced six excellent solutions to Brazil: distributed cloud native infrastructure, cloud native databases, data-AI convergence, storage disaster recovery, an IT governance system (Landing Zone), and deterministic operations. Together, these solutions help provide financial institutions with an enjoyable cloud journey.

Preparation: Landing Zone for Lean IT Governance

Chen Longfei, the General Manager of Huawei Cloud Landing Zone, explained how Huawei Cloud helped a top state-owned bank in Southeast Asia set up a lean IT governance system. Currently, risks in global banking have been on the rise. Many banks urgently need to improve their service agility and reduce security compliance risks. Huawei Cloud Landing Zone provides them with a lean IT governance system that allows for one-click account creation and provisioning, centralized security network operations, data leakage prevention, and multi-account compliance audits. It helped this bank significantly improve their management efficiency, ensured service isolation and security compliance, and eliminated more than 200 risky or non-compliant operations.

Chen Longfei，General Manager of Huawei Cloud Landing Zone

Application Modernization: Cloud Native and Containerization

Zuo Shaofu, the Chief Cloud Native Product Officer of Huawei Cloud, shared how Huawei Cloud helped one of the world's largest banks build a cloud native infrastructure with millions of computing cores. Focusing on multi-active deployment, cross-region disaster recovery, service innovation, agile iteration, central management, and IDC modernization, Huawei Cloud delivered a reliable, efficient, and innovative cloud native infrastructure. With an architecture that was a step ahead of other vendor offerings, Huawei Cloud leads the cloud native industry with 30% higher performance than the competition while reducing costs by 20%.

Zuo Shaofu, Chief Cloud-native Product Officer, Huawei Cloud

Data Migration and Management: Databases + Big Data

Eric Chen, the Chief Data Solution Architect of Huawei Cloud, shared how Huawei Cloud data-AI convergence helped a top Chinese bank，which is a prominent retail banking service provider，implement a data-driven operations strategy. Huawei Cloud combined its MapReduce service (MRS, an open source big data service) and Data Warehouse Service (DWS) into an industry-leading data lakehouse. Convergent data and AI capabilities have helped the customer significantly improve its data-driven experience. The average time required to process a batch task was shortened by 2 hours, and the user satisfaction for ad hoc query response was doubled.

Eric Chen, Chief Data Solution Architect, Huawei Cloud

Huawei has been engaged in database development for more than 20 years, with thousands of R&D engineers and 700+ database patents. Danny Chen, the Senior Principal Architect of Huawei Cloud Database Product Dept, described how Huawei Cloud migrated the credit system (including 20 million lines of stored procedures) of one of the world's largest banks to the cloud within 150 days. Huawei Cloud provides professional database services to facilitate architecture selection, high availability assurance, data migration, workload replay, database performance comparison (before and after migration), and optimal cutover policies. More than 95% of database objects were automatically migrated, and the cost for restructuring applications was reduced by over 90%. The credit system has been running stably on cloud for three years without any major faults.

Danny Chen，Senior Principal Architect of Huawei Cloud Database Product Dept.

Cloud Governance: Storage Backup and DR + Deterministic Operations

Colin Lin, the President of Huawei Cloud Storage Service Product Dept, shared the use of Huawei Cloud backup and disaster recovery solution in industries including finance, automotive, and telecom. He said: "Huawei Cloud has over 18 years of experience in storage R&D. We provide end-to-end anti-ransomware, multi-cloud backup and disaster recovery, and one-stop professional services to ensure secure, reliable, efficient, and easy-to-use backup and disaster recovery".

Colin Lin，President, Huawei Cloud Storage Service Product Dept.

Deterministic operations comprehensively consolidate cloud management capabilities. Fish Wang, Huawei Cloud Latin America SRE Director, shared the case of China's top joint-stock commercial bank. The four objectives of deterministic operations are: a culture of quality, high-availability architecture, dynamic risk management, and intelligent O&M. With these objectives, Huawei Cloud helped this bank achieve the service availability SLO of 99.999%, making O&M revolution completed ahead of digital transformation. This case let customers know how to set up a deterministic operations system to change the way they manage the cloud. With deterministic operations, the O&M will become more stable, secure, and trustworthy with more efficient resource utilization and more agile services. In this process, O&M teams will be change makers. In the future, enterprises will shift from traditional O&M to deterministic operations for more efficient O&M and cloud management.

Fish Wang，Huawei Cloud LATAM SRE Director

In the concluding speech, Ivan Yang, Huawei Cloud Brazil CEO, said that, "Huawei Cloud has covered 30 Regions and 88 AZs around the world through KooVerse, our global cloud infrastructure. 3AZ deployment in Brazil is Huawei Cloud's most important strategy. This strategy works with local services to deliver excellent customer experience for FinTechs in Brazil. The success stories from major customers in China, Thailand, and other areas prove Huawei Cloud's leading capabilities in the financial industry, and present new perspectives of business success for Brazilian customers. "

Ivan Yang，Huawei Cloud Brazil CEO

Huawei Cloud has been rooted in Brazil for many years. It integrates long-term technical accumulation and global resources. We look forward to working with customers and partners to accelerate the digital transformation of the financial FinTech industry in Brazil.