News in Cloud Computing & Data Storage

Colt to deliver new cloud services via OVHcloud partnership

Colt Technology Services (Colt), a digital infrastructure company, has announced a partnership with OVHcloud, a global cloud player, which brings extensive public and private cloud services to business customers in over 140 countries. The collaboration sees organisations benefit from the security and flexibility of Colt’s award-winning Dedicated Cloud Access connectivity, coupled with the robust data protection built into OVHcloud’s diverse set of public and private cloud services available through OVHcloud Connect. OVHcloud operates over 450,000 servers within 43 data centres, serving 1.6 million customers across four continents. Spearheading a trusted cloud and pioneering a sustainable cloud service, OVHcloud offers customers the latest-generation solutions combining performance, predictable pricing, and complete data sovereignty to support their unfettered growth. Colt provides connectivity to OVHcloud via eight points of presence (PoPs) in Europe, and one in Singapore. This connectivity gives businesses the opportunity to access OVHcloud from Colt’s extensive last-mile footprint of over 32,000 connected buildings and 1,200 data centres globally, across a wide range of cloud connectivity options including SD WAN, Ethernet, Wave and IPVPN, and Colt’s first-to-market On Demand network-as-service (NaaS). Colt’s Dedicated Cloud Access provides secure connectivity that is dedicated to the customer, and thus provides optimal latencies and full bandwidth guarantees. The announcement comes as growth in the cloud market continues, with 94% of enterprises globally now using cloud services, according to one report. Besides the ongoing Cloud trend, improving security was also a top priority for IT investment as identified in Colt’s latest IT Priorities research, cited by 40% of the 1,000-plus respondents. Peter Coppens, VP Infrastructure and Connectivity Solutions at Colt, says, “Data sovereignty and security are top of mind for IT leaders tasked with accelerating cloud migration. They need to know their data is watertight – not just within the cloud itself, but also transitioning into and out of the cloud. Our partnership with OVHcloud gives businesses the peace-of-mind that comes from working with two organisations which meet the most robust data protection standards and have a deep understanding of European and Global data sovereignty topics, backed up with global scale and a shared dedication to delivering the best customer experience”. Yaniv Fdida, Chief Product and Technology Officer OVHcloud, adds, “We are delighted to work with Colt and offer OVHcloud services and solutions to even more customers throughout the world.” OVHcloud and Colt share a deep commitment to sustainability, the companies tell us. Colt is committed to sustainable infrastructure across its entire value chain: through reducing scope 3 emissions to using sustainable energy resources, refurbished hardware components and incorporating end-of-life processes which promote circular economy principles. OVHcloud, meanwhile, has been leveraging for over 20 years an integrated model that guarantees total control of its value chain: from the design of its servers with a bespoke watercooling system to the construction and management of its data centres, so customers can seize the benefits of an environmentally-conscious model with a frugal use of resources and a carbon footprint reaching the best ratios in the industry. For more from Colt Technology Services, click here.

Singtel and Hitachi partner to accelerate industrial AI solutions

Singtel, a communications technology group in Asia, and Hitachi Digital, representing Hitachi’s broad end-to-end digital transformation services and technology capabilities, have announced a new collaboration that will pair Hitachi’s deep AI expertise with Singtel’s Paragon platform, the all-in-one orchestration platform for 5G, edge computing and cloud. Hitachi Digital will deploy Paragon at the Hitachi Americas’ Santa Clara R&D Labs, followed by a pilot in a US factory for Industry 4.0 use cases. The pilot will aim to validate the interoperability of Hitachi AI applications on quality assurance, workplace safety, immersive training and pre-emptive maintenance on Paragon. The trial will also enable the integration of Paragon with Hitachi industry cloud applications and digital services to enable enterprises to transcend the limitations of complex, low-latency connectivity and productivity experiences. Hitachi’s pre-built Industrial AI applications, together with the Paragon platform’s network and multi-cloud orchestration capabilities, will be used to create multiple Paragon-related offerings to help clients improve and accelerate their cloud operations. Subsequently, Hitachi Digital Services will go to market with these offerings as a Singtel Paragon authorised System Integrator – presenting a unique value proposition to enterprise customers looking to leverage multiple network protocols in delivering digital transformation in industrial settings. Bill Chang, CEO of Singtel’s Digital InfraCo, says, “Enterprises in the fast-growing Industry 4.0 sector depend on high quality, reliable connectivity to ensure smooth operations. We are pleased to collaborate with Hitachi Digital, leveraging Paragon to manage its connectivity and cloud needs across Hitachi’s manufacturing facilities. Integrating Hitachi’s advanced AI applications with Paragon’s ecosystem will enhance our suite of solutions for manufacturing enterprises and enable them to seamlessly transform their operations powered by AI.” Frank Antonysamy, Chief Growth Officer, Hitachi Digital, adds, “Hitachi has invested heavily in combining decades of digital, data, cloud, AI, cybersecurity, and connectivity expertise to establish transformative solutions for Industry Cloud deployments. Our applications and consulting services in this area have been an integral part of the digitalisation movement impacting businesses around the world. We anticipate that this partnership with Singtel will enable us to once again increase the capabilities of next gen technologies in enterprise environments, enabling a new level of productivity for customers." Organisations have often struggled with industrial 5G deployments because of complex and fragmented solutions. AI has added a new layer of complexity to this equation as organisations now also attempt to accelerate AI adoption in these scenarios. Singtel Paragon is a comprehensive solution that enables them to connect with the 5G network and securely deploy edge computing and AI rapidly on telco infrastructure, thus reducing time-to-market and shortening the innovation curve. The collaboration between Singtel and Hitachi will bring together interoperable solutions with expert delivery services, which will greatly benefit organisations seeking to address industrial AI complexity. For more from Singtel, click here.

Nasuni strengthens European footprint with French expansion

Nasuni, an enterprise data platform for hybrid cloud environments, has announced further investment and expansion into the French market, strengthening its European presence. The company's data platform built for hybrid cloud supports enterprises facing growing unstructured data volumes with scalability, built-in security, fast edge performance, and AI-ready data. Organisations across France are embracing the AI revolution, a market which is set to grow by over 28% from 2024 to 2030. This is unearthing a critical need for enterprises to unlock unstructured data repositories and curate AI-ready data. In parallel, the evolving cybersecurity threat landscape in France (the fifth most attacked country by ransomware) is putting enterprise data at risk. Operating in France since 2017, Nasuni is experiencing strong demand from organisations across France and Europe for its data platform. The company says that organisations rely on Nasuni to turn unstructured data into rich repositories in order to drive AI implementations across their businesses, while strengthening cyber resilience and cutting infrastructure costs. Nasuni’s client roster already includes nine of France’s top 50 market cap companies, with customers including the likes of Pernod Ricard, TBWA, Colas, Safran, and France Habitation. “We’re seeing a rapid rise of forward-thinking French businesses undergoing cloud transformations to accelerate AI implementations and secure data in the face of evolving ransomware threats,” says Chris Addis, Vice President of Sales, EMEA at Nasuni. “Our expansion in the French market across sales, technical sales, and partnerships reflects the growing demands we’re seeing for the Nasuni File Data Platform in supporting enterprises with these challenges and driving growth. We are excited to have now achieved critical mass in France, and this rapid growth alongside the growth of our partner network marks an exciting time for Nasuni as we continue to expand operations in Europe.” Nasuni’s key partnerships in France include arcITek, an innovative French IT services provider. Together, Nasuni and arcITek support French businesses by accelerating cloud transformations, delivering robust cyber resiliency, and enabling successful AI implementations. Nasuni also works closely with hyperscalers Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Google Cloud, and supports enterprise customers across a host of different sectors in France, with a focus on automotive, manufacturing, consumer goods, engineering, and energy. “It’s an exciting time as enterprises are rapidly adopting AI to drive efficiencies and innovation, and accelerating cloud transformations to enable this,” notes Taniel Doniguian, President at arcITek. “It’s great to see French businesses adopting modern data platforms to drive their business growth, and we’re delighted to work with Nasuni to provide this critical solution. We support enterprises in implementing these technologies and Nasuni has been a key partner of ours for a number of years, helping us to provide firms with the efficient and secure ability to access and manage their unstructured file data while readying for the adoption of GenAI.” Nasuni’s expansion in the French market follows another year of strong momentum for the company, as it added more than 120 new large enterprise customers across all verticals in 2023. For more from Nasuni, click here.

Spirent announces addition of cloud-native function testing

Spirent Communications, a provider of test and assurance solutions for next-generation devices and networks, has announced the addition of cloud-native function (CNF) resiliency testing to its Spirent Landslide solution to continuously test the impact of CNF performance on the delivery of 5G standalone services. The expansion of Landslide’s capabilities to include CNF testing within a single test solution platform will help further address the evolving needs of mobile network operators (MNOs) and Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) as they transition to cloud-native environments. The 5G standalone core, with its service-based architecture and embrace of the public and private clouds to support rapid time-to-market and scalable network operations, has the potential to unlock business opportunities with new ways to deploy, operate, and manage networks and services. While the new disaggregated and distributed architecture provides for a dynamic multi-cloud, multivendor ecosystem, it also presents a raft of daunting new challenges for service providers. “The need for integration and interoperability across the 5G network means not only dealing with the complexity of how to incorporate new cloud infrastructures and virtual network functions with legacy systems and processes, but also how to test and optimise the performance of these new distributed infrastructures to ensure that they will all work together as they should,” says Anil Kollipara, VP of Automated Test & Assurance Product Management at Spirent. “Cloud-native demands completely new processes to realise the efficiencies and operational benefits, while each CNF has unique performance expectations within the cloud environment. Adding cloud resiliency testing to Landslide’s already considerable testing and validation capabilities will help network service providers more easily tackle the challenges of embracing new cloud environments to deliver the high-quality 5G services that end users are demanding.” Patrick Kelly, Founder and Principal Analyst at Appledore Research adds, "Spirent Landslide's CNF resiliency testing introduces a vital advancement in core 5G testing for mobile operators tackling the intricacies of 5G standalone and advanced networks. This enhancement streamlines complex pre-test and post-deployment procedures, optimising 5G services to ensure high performance and reliability in the ever-evolving CNF environment." Spirent Landslide is the only single pane solution that can generate real-world 5G traffic and simultaneously impair the 5G cloud core to assess and correlate its impact on 5G services. This is especially important with cloud deployments, where failures are the norm and CNFs must be designed to be resilient to avert serious consequences with 5G service quality. MNOs and NEMs have traditionally relied on manual testing processes and self-developed automation scripts, leading to inefficiencies and increased testing complexity. Ambiguity surrounding ownership of 5G services in CNF environments is also presenting additional concerns for service providers, requiring a fundamental shift in the testing mindset from reliability-focused legacy networks to resilient and scalable CNF networks. For more from Spirent Communications, click here.

Macquarie launches Dell and Azure hybrid cloud offering

In an Australian first, Macquarie Cloud Services, part of Macquarie Technology Group, has leveraged strategic relationships with Microsoft and Dell Technologies to launch Macquarie Flex. Macquarie Flex is a unique hybrid solution powered by Microsoft Azure Stack HCI (Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure) and Dell Technologies APEX Cloud Platform for Microsoft Azure providing workload flexibility, a single management plane, consistent experience, 24/7 mission critical support and evergreen compliance across public, private and hybrid cloud environments. As the first Dell Technologies partner offering Azure Stack HCI in Australia, the launch seeks to assist organisations that have traditionally been challenged by the integration costs and complexity of hybrid cloud. Now, Macquarie Flex provides these organisations with a new solution to simplify hybrid cloud management, manage cloud spend and meet compliance and sovereign requirements. “Macquarie Flex is the true definition of hybrid and represents a new era of hybrid cloud solutions,” says Macquarie Cloud Services Head of Azure, Naran McClung. “Azure and private cloud, two disparate environments promising different things for different purposes, are bound together to provide Australian businesses the choice, flexibility, and agility needed to succeed.” “Macquarie Flex allows us to meet our customers wherever they are on their cloud journey,” adds Jonathan Staff, Head of Private Cloud at Macquarie Cloud Services. “Through our strong relationship with Dell Technologies and Microsoft, we can now arm Australian businesses with another lever to extract more value from their IT investment.” Steven Worrall, Managing Director, Microsoft Australia and New Zealand, adds, “Macquarie Flex represents a significant advancement in hybrid cloud solutions. By leveraging Microsoft Azure Stack HCI, Macquarie Cloud Services is providing an unparalleled level of flexibility, security, and performance. This collaboration exemplifies our commitment to empowering Australian organisations with the tools and technologies needed to drive innovation and achieve their strategic goals.” With Macquarie Flex, organisations now can deploy and run sensitive/compliance-driven workloads in a private cloud whilst leveraging the benefits of Azure, diversify deployment locations to improve commercial viability, treat private cloud workloads as first-class citizens of Azure, as well as monitor, alert, report, backup, secure, manage and govern virtual workloads through one integrated toolset. This announcement follows the company’s recent launch of Macquarie Guard, a full turnkey Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution that automates practical guardrails into Azure services. “Our purpose is to help customers who have been traditionally underserved and overcharged”, Naran states. “We’re thrilled to be leveraging our long-standing partnerships with Microsoft and Dell Technologies to deliver much needed new innovation to Australian businesses.” For more from Macquarie, click here.

Verkada launches in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland

Verkada, a porivder of cloud-based physical security products, is expanding its operations to Germany, Austria, and Switzerland (DACH) under the leadership of Benjamin Krebs. This expansion comes as Verkada is seeing strong sales and partner growth across EMEA. “Today, more than 24,000 customers across 85 countries trust Verkada as their safety solution,” says Eric Salava, Chief Revenue Officer at Verkada. “Establishing operations in the DACH region, which represents the largest economy in Europe, is a natural next step as we continue to grow internationally.” As a result, Verkada’s Command platform and website are now available in German, providing German-speaking customers with full access to Verkada’s services in their native language so that they have the necessary resources to make informed security decisions. “The DACH region is renowned for its unwavering commitment to both cyber and physical security,” says Benjamin Krebs, Managing Director, DACH at Verkada. “Customers across the region are looking for fully integrated security solutions that provide intelligent insights to keep their organisation safe in a privacy-sensitive way. “As cloud-based physical security becomes the industry standard, I am looking forward to working with our growing team, customers, and partner network to help more organisations across the DACH region keep the communities they live and work in safe.”

Arista unveils Etherlink AI networking platforms

Arista Networks, a provider of cloud and AI networking solutions, has announced the Arista Etherlink AI platforms, designed to deliver optimal network performance for the most demanding AI workloads, including training and inferencing. Powered by new AI-optimised Arista EOS features, the Arista Etherlink AI portfolio supports AI cluster sizes ranging from thousands to 100,000s of XPUs with highly efficient one and two-tier network topologies that deliver superior application performance compared to more complex multi-tier networks while offering advanced monitoring capabilities including flow-level visibility. “The network is core to successful job completion outcomes in AI clusters,” says Alan Weckel, Founder and Technology Analyst for 650 Group. “The Arista Etherlink AI platforms offer customers the ability to have a single 800G end-to-end technology platform across front-end, training, inference and storage networks. Customers benefit from leveraging the same well-proven Ethernet tooling, security, and expertise they have relied on for decades while easily scaling up for any AI application.” Arista’s Etherlink AI platforms The 7060X6 AI Leaf switch family employs Broadcom Tomahawk 5 silicon, with a capacity of 51.2Tbps and support for 64 800G or 128 400G Ethernet ports. The 7800R4 AI Spine is the fourth generation of Arista’s flagship 7800 modular systems. It implements the latest Broadcom Jericho3-AI processors with an AI-optimised packet pipeline and offers non-blocking throughput with the proven virtual output queuing architecture. The 7800R4-AI supports up to 460Tbps in a single chassis, which corresponds to 576 800G or 1152 400G Ethernet ports. The 7700R4 AI Distributed Etherlink Switch (DES) supports the largest AI clusters, offering customers massively parallel distributed scheduling and congestion-free traffic spraying based on the Jericho3-AI architecture. The 7700 represents the first in a new series of ultra-scalable, intelligent distributed systems that can deliver the highest consistent throughput for very large AI clusters. A single-tier network topology with Etherlink platforms can support over 10,000 XPUs. With a two-tier network, Etherlink can support more than 100,000 XPUs. Minimising the number of network tiers is essential for optimising AI application performance, reducing the number of optical transceivers, lowering cost and improving reliability. All Etherlink switches support the emerging Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) standards, which are expected to provide additional performance benefits when UEC NICs become available in the near future. “Broadcom is a firm believer in the versatility, performance, and robustness of Ethernet, which makes it the technology of choice for AI workloads,” says Ram Velaga, Senior Vice President and General Manager, Core Switching Group, Broadcom. “By leveraging industry-leading Ethernet chips such as Tomahawk 5 and Jericho3-AI, Arista provides the ideal accelerator-agnostic solution for AI clusters of any shape or size, outperforming proprietary technologies and providing flexible options for fixed, modular, and distributed switching platforms.” Arista EOS Smart AI Suite The rich features of Arista EOS and CloudVision complement these new networking-for-AI platforms. The innovative software suite for AI-for-networking, security, segmentation, visibility, and telemetry features brings AI-grade robustness and protection to high-value AI clusters and workloads. For example, Arista EOS’s Smart AI suite of innovative enhancements now integrates with SmartNIC providers to deliver advanced RDMA-aware load balancing and QoS. Arista AI Analyzer powered by Arista AVA automates configuration and improves visibility and intelligent performance analysis of AI workloads. “Arista’s competitive advantage consistently comes down to our rich operating system and broad product portfolio to address AI networks of all sizes,” says Hugh Holbrook, Chief Development Officer, Arista Networks. “Innovative AI-optimised EOS features enable faster deployment, reduce configuration issues and deliver flow-level performance analysis, and improve AI job completion times for any size AI cluster.” The 7060X6 is available now. The 7800R4-AI and 7700R4 DES are in customer testing and will be available 2H 2024. For more from Arista Networks, click here.

PagerDuty innovations set to improve operational efficiency

PagerDuty, a global provider of digital operations management, has introduced new capabilities and upgrades for the PagerDuty Operations Cloud. The new capabilities are critical to enterprises that are modernising their operations centres, standardising automation practices, transforming incident management, and automating their remote-location operations. Now teams can take advantage of AI and automation and more powerful end-to-end incident management capabilities to anticipate, identify and resolve operational issues more quickly than ever. The PagerDuty Operations Cloud combines Incident Management, AIOps, Automation, Customer Service Operations and PagerDuty Copilot (early access) into a flexible, easy-to-use platform designed for mission-critical, time-sensitive, high-impact work across IT, DevOps, security and business teams. The platform is enhanced by APIs that allow organisations to integrate with multiple technology stacks, delivering reliable availability for operational transformation. “To remain competitive, companies must innovate rapidly and deliver an always-on, immediate digital experience that consumers expect. With the massive amount of noise coming in across teams and tools, it’s challenging to act quickly when your teams are mired in antiquated systems and manual processes, especially at scale,” says Jeffrey Hausman, Chief Product Development Officer at PagerDuty. “The PagerDuty Operations Cloud makes it easy for business and IT leaders to cross the operational chasm by giving them advanced AI and automation capabilities to address some of the most complex, cross-functional processes of enterprise operations, which frees up time and resources to focus on the most mission-critical work to drive their business.” PagerDuty Copilot (early access) - the generative AI assistant embedded in the PagerDuty Operations Cloud - augments and scales operations teams with AI and automation to manage mission-critical work faster and more effectively. By interpreting the results of automated diagnostics, providing responders with helpful incident context, drafting status updates and generating drafts of post-incident reviews with the click of a button, PagerDuty Copilot allows teams to eliminate time-consuming and repetitive tasks so they can focus on high-priority needs. If the user asks PagerDuty Copilot to generate a post-incident review, it can generate a draft in seconds - reduced from the hours it typically takes. In addition, PagerDuty Copilot can provide a quick synopsis of the incident through simple prompts, which creates a summary view of the incident. Responders coming into incidents can leverage PagerDuty generative AI to rapidly summarise incident details, Slack notes and customer impact in a moment. PagerDuty Copilot saves responders precious time because they no longer need to spend time collecting dispersed data points and important details. PagerDuty Operations Console (early access), the latest AIOps offering, serves as a single source of truth on newly created incidents, providing a live, shared view of operational health. Flexible filters ensure issues are immediately discoverable so that network operations centre (NOC) and ITOps teams can triage and take action on issues quickly to minimise business impact and protect customer experience. Teams can accelerate triage and resolution using valuable context surfaced directly in a single view, including the impact of an issue, key insights, the ability to run automated diagnostics, recommended actions, and the ability to predict the next likely incident. PagerDuty Automation helps organisations standardise operations, improve efficiency, and enhance customer experiences by connecting and automating critical work across teams, systems and environments. PagerDuty Workflow Automation allows both developers and non-developers to fully automate complex and manual operations processes - including human steps such as gathering approvals, making decisions or providing updates - and can leverage runbooks in PagerDuty Runbook Automation as part of the process. As a result, teams reduce risks associated with human error and see dramatic improvements in operational efficiencies. New capabilities for PagerDuty Runbook Automation enable organizations to build, deploy, run and manage automation jobs at scale to standardize automation across the business. Project-based runner management (early access) helps organisations increase the adoption of automation while allowing each team to operate efficiently within their particular technical requirements and dependencies. PagerDuty Incident Management - an enterprise-grade solution that unites PagerDuty’s incident management product with the power of Jeli’s innovative post-incident review capabilities into a single end-to-end offering. PagerDuty empowers organisations to standardise processes with guided remediation and automated workflows directly from Slack, turning every incident into an opportunity to learn and improve. The dynamic narrative builder can drag content from Slack directly into post-incident review. Incident analysis is critical to identify patterns for what happened and why so that teams can adjust processes and avoid repeat issues. This sets organisations up with a more proactive approach to managing incidents that can deliver more resilient operations over time. "Delivering speed and resiliency are key mechanisms to successfully driving growth and customer loyalty," says Stephen Elliot, Group Vice President, I&O, Cloud Operations, and DevOps at IDC. "As organisations scale, they need to implement automation into their operations practices to continue to deliver uninterrupted, consumer-grade digital experiences." The PagerDuty Operations Console is currently in early access and will be generally available in Q3 of 2024.

Huawei Cloud announces Cairo region

Huawei Cloud today announced its Cairo Region, making Huawei the first company to launch a public cloud in Egypt. The Cairo Region covers 28 African countries and contributes to Huawei Cloud’s support of digital transformation of vertical industries. Announced at the Huawei Cloud Summit in Cairo, the announcement of the Cairo Region brings Huawei Cloud’s total number of regions to 33 worldwide. Huawei says that the Cairo Region will provide innovative, reliable, secure, and flexible cloud services to individuals, corporate and government users and serve as important digital infrastructure. Huawei Cloud has been offering innovative services on its platform including the DataArts data governance pipeline including the GaussDB database, and the ModelArts AI development pipeline. “With the Cairo Region, we are bringing our most innovative technologies to the country to further support Egypt to unlock the potential of digital transformation,” says Jacqueline Shi, President of Global Marketing and Sales Services at Huawei Cloud. “Furthermore, the launch of the Cairo Region is an important step in Huawei Cloud being able to enhance our services to customers across 28 African countries such as Egypt, Ethiopia and Algeria.” Huawei Cloud also released a new Arabic large language model (LLM). The new Arabic LLM is an important step in supporting companies in the region with the digital transformation of vertical industries. The automatic speech recognition (ASR) service supports functions covering over 20 Arabic speaking countries, with the accuracy rate reaching 96%. It is the first 100-billion parameter Arabic LLM in the industry. The model has been trained with native Arabic data, ensuring an accurate understanding of the local culture, history, knowledge customs and more of the Arab world, rather than relying on a body of English work and translating. As an important part of Huawei Cloud’s Pangu model’s endeavour to support vertical industries with AI capabilities, the training of the model is based on industry datasets covering digital power, oil and gas, finance and more. Jacqueline continues, “We believe that every country should have AI capabilities to preserve its local culture and that AI models should be developed and trained with local languages, enabling vertical industries to become more efficient.” Huawei previously announced that it will invest $300 million ($235m) to establish the first public cloud region in Egypt, offering over 200 cloud services including AI platforms, data platforms, and development platforms. To nurture a thriving ecosystem, Huawei will invest $200 million ($157m) to support 200 local software partners, to empower 1,300 channel partners and eventually to build a prosperous local software and application ecosystem. In the region, Huawei will invest $30 million ($23m) to train 10,000 local developers and educate 100,000 digital professionals, to drive intelligent transformation in the region. To further accelerate ecosystem development, Huawei Cloud announced upgrades to its startup program in Egypt, including an advanced cloud platform, training programmes and business resources. The Huawei Cloud Startup Program assigns dedicated teams to advise on startups’ cloud adoption and subsidises their cloud consumption. A single startup can apply for cloud credits worth up to $150,000 (£117,000). Huawei Cloud is the second largest cloud services provider in China, according to research firm Canalys. It has been steadily expanding its global footprint, opening new data centres in Turkey and Saudi Arabia last year and operating a total of 93 availability zones over 33 regions globally. Huawei Egypt was founded in 2000. Huawei says that it is committed to collaborating with over 350 local partners and enriching the local ecosystem. In terms of supporting ICT talent, the company has set up 90 ICT academies, a flagship 'Seeds for the Future' programme, and ICT competition. These talent programmes have benefited over 35,000 Egyptian ICT talent. For more from Huawei, click here.

CMC Cloud to take Africa to the edge

CMC Networks, a global Tier 1 service provider, has launched CMC Cloud to deliver high-performance edge computing across Africa. CMC Cloud is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) solution designed to bring workloads closer to the end user and improve the performance of applications and services, without the need to invest in physical hardware. CMC Cloud provides a decentralised edge infrastructure to reduce latency and bandwidth use, helping to enhance the performance and reliability of digital services across Africa. This is essential for real-time applications using transactional data, video streaming, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The IaaS model provides businesses with access to virtual servers, storage, and networking infrastructure on a flexible, scalable and agile basis. “CMC Cloud has been purpose-built for the African continent. We understand local needs and challenges across markets, and our new IaaS offering is providing tailored solutions to address the specific requirements of African businesses,” says Marisa Trisolino, CEO at CMC Networks. “We want to remove the barriers to cloud adoption, simplifying and accelerating the growth of Africa’s digital economy. CMC Cloud is making this a reality with a flexible, scalable and cost-efficient model.” CMC Networks makes it simple for both local and international businesses to enter and expand across African markets by overcoming data sovereignty laws which can otherwise limit cloud adoption. It offers cloud services that store and process data within country borders, helping organisations to comply with country-specific legal and regulatory requirements regarding data storage and privacy. These privacy and security measures are crucial for sectors such as finance, healthcare, and public services with sensitive data handling protocols. “CMC Cloud, on top of our vast network footprint and ‘application-first’ AI core routing capabilities, delivers a holistic approach to digital transformation,” notes Geoff Dornan, CTO at CMC Networks. “Customers can easily adjust computing resources to meet changing business demands while optimising performance with smooth and responsive access to applications and data. The flexibility of CMC Cloud helps in scaling resources in accordance with demand, making it a cost-effective solution for start-ups, SMEs, and large enterprises alike. With CMC Cloud, we’re making it easier than ever for businesses to thrive in today’s digital economy.” CMC Cloud provides various compute, storage and networking solutions including Virtual Machines, memory, block storage, object storage, IP addresses, Firewall as a Service (FWaaS), IP Premier Dedicated Internet Access (DIA), Distributed Denial of Service Protection as a Service (DDoSPaaS), Carrier Ethernet, MPLS and Multi Cloud Connect. CMC Networks’ Flex-Edge packages software-defined wide-area networking (SD-WAN), SDN, network functions virtualisation (NFV) and security into one solution, without physical presence required in-country. CMC Networks has the largest pan-African network, servicing 51 out of 54 countries in Africa and 12 countries in the Middle East. For more from CMC Cloud, click here.