MWC 2024 Replay: Huawei unlocks resilient, ‘non-stop’ banking with four-pronged solutions strategy

With the goal to enhance intelligence in the digital banking arena, Huawei has unveiled a new framework to bolster infrastructure resilience.

Speaking at Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona, Jason Cao, Huawei’s CEO of Digital Finance BU, acknowledged that digital financial services are “booming” and that the rise of open architecture as well as emerging technologies like generative AI will have an impact on key fields in the industry such as financial engagement and credit loans.

“All these changes bring new challenges and demand new standards of resilience. We believe that resilience must be redefined and consolidated to really let intelligence spread its wings,” he added.

Jason Cao, Huawei’s CEO of Digital Finance BU

Coining the term “non-stop banking”, Mr. Cao referred to an undisrupted financial services system running on a strong infrastructure foundation that is built to accelerate the industry’s digital and intelligent transformation journey.

Under the banner of “Bank 4 Zeros”, Huawei outlined key markers of resilience in the digital era, mainly, zero downtime and high availability of services, zero-touch operations, zero-trust security and zero-wait user experience.

Firstly, to achieve zero downtime, Huawei introduced its upgraded Multi-Site High Availability Service (MAS) architecture, which is designed to provide end-to-end service failover and disaster recovery drill capabilities for faster service recovery and better continuity.

In addition, the solution provider’s GaussDB – an enterprise-grade distributed relational database – has been developed to enable better availability, security, performance, intelligence and elasticity for the financial services industry.

At the same time, Huawei’s all-flash storage will continue to support its financial customers. Mr. Cao revealed that Huawei will be seeking to “exploit the advantages of multi-technology collaboration” as part of efforts to make storage work more efficiently with databases, containers and network optical connectivity to further reduce recovery time objective (RTO).

Secondly, to deliver zero-touch operations, inspired by its Autonomous Driving Network (ADN) , Huawei has set out to equip its customers with greater autonomy and intelligence by the Network Digital Map solution.

The solution has been upgraded based on cloud-map algorithms and digital twins. Mr. Cao elaborated that it taps into large artificial intelligence (AI) models to visualise correlations as well as changes to networks, traffic and applications in real time.

Meanwhile, under the third prong of zero trust, Huawei stated the need to build “multi-layer in-depth defense” to ensure service and data security.

“As digitalisation expands, so do the vulnerabilities of every data point and network connection,” Mr. Cao explained. “In 2023, the number of cyber attacks on global banks increased by 520%, and the average service recovery time of financial institutions after ransomware attacks was 16.3 days.”

Against the backdrop of the current threat landscape, Huawei is building on its multi-layer anti-ransomware solution.

Huawei believes in two lines of defense against this threat. The first being the network, the solution uses firewalls for detection and prevents the ransomware from proliferating horizontally.

Storage, which forms the second line of defense, is where the ransomware is identified and data is protected from encrypting and tampering by using backup and air-gap recovery to ensure service recovery.

“We have upgraded the OceanProtect integrated backup solution,” added Mr. Cao. “With the large-scale parallel algorithms, the data recovery speed reaches 172 TB/hour, five times higher than the industry average, helping customers immediately recover services.”

Lastly, Huawei has recognised the demand for good customer experience by enabling banks to offer real-time capabilities to create zero wait.

At the core of this tenet is delivering real-time data processing. Mr. Cao shared that Huawei’s data intelligence solution combines an all-serverless architecture with data lakehouse and data-AI convergence.

Compared to traditional data architecture and warehouses, Huawei’s data warehouse services promise the ability to handle enormous amounts of data and support full real-time upgrades.

“Using transaction data in real time for analysis and decisions is all about the real-time data capability,” said Mr. Cao. “Huawei’s Data Intelligence Solution makes every engagement real-time and is the ideal choice to build a zero-wait experience.”

The Huawei leader emphasised the inevitability of the world moving into a digital era and cautioned businesses of the uncertainty they will face. Mr. Cao continued to position the impetus for banks across the scale to rethink their models of resilience when it comes to their technology operations. “We hope to work together with our customers to meet this challenge, build ‘4 Zeros’ through our technology, reshape resilience, and eventually achieve non-stop banking,” he concluded.

Shirin Robert attended Mobile World Congress 2024 in Barcelona as a guest of Huawei.