Learning About Huawei Cloud

Tune in to this episode of Ask A CISO to hear:

• How Huawei leverages strategic partnerships to ensure compliance with international and territorial compliance standards for their cloud platform and their customers
• Huawei's best practices
• What the five business units at Huawei are, how the expertise of each unit can be harnessed for custom solutions, and two implementations of this unique synergy
• Does Huawei only serve Chinese customers?
• What are Huawei's Cloud's strengths?

About The Guest: Dennis

Dennis Chan is currently the Country Cybersecurity & Privacy Officer (CSPO) of Huawei Singapore. As CSPO, he oversees risk management and compliance of cybersecurity and privacy protection according to the requirements of Singapore regulators and customers and drive the adoption of industry best practices within the organization.

Prior to his current role, he has served as the Vice President of Public Affairs & Communications Dept where he was the liaison for governmental affairs and managed the strategic partnerships with various Singapore government agencies. Dennis has more than 15 years of experience in sales covering both the public and private sectors with a proven track record and experience in leading a team of sales and pre-sales in Huawei.

Previously he was the Account Director for Carrier/Telco (StarHub, Nucleus Connect, and ST Telemedia) and was also the Sales Vice-President for Enterprise-Government Account serving customers from Singapore government ministries and statutory boards

About The Guest: Tey Liangwei

Tey Liang Wei is the Cloud Partner Development Lead of HUAWEI CLOUD Singapore, taking care of the Consulting Partner (CP) Ecosystem. Liang Wei is in charge of recruiting, enabling and supporting Consulting Partners such as SIs, VARs, and MSPs with the goal of building a robust Cloud partner ecosystem in Singapore. With more than 12 years of experience in the Tech industry, Liang Wei has spent time in major Distribution and SI firms; and is extremely familiar with how the Partner Ecosystem works.

About The Host: Paul Hadjy

Paul Hadjy is co-founder and CEO of Horangi Cyber Security. 

Paul leads a team of cybersecurity specialists who create software to solve challenging cybersecurity problems. Horangi brings world-class solutions to provide clients in the Asian market with the right, actionable data to make critical cybersecurity decisions.

Prior to Horangi, Paul worked at Palantir Technologies, where he was instrumental in expanding Palantir’s footprint in the Asia Pacific. 

He worked across Singapore, Korea, and New Zealand to build Palantir's business in both the commercial and government space and grow its regional teams. 

He has over a decade of experience and expertise in Anti-Money Laundering, Insider Threats, Cyber Security, Government, and Commercial Banking. 

Transcript

Daniel

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to today's episode of Ask A CISO podcastAsk A CISO podcast with me, I'm Daniel Hii from Horangi. I'll be hosting today's podcast episode on behalf of Paul. It's our honor to invite two distinguished guests from Huawei Singapore today. They are my friend, Dennis Chan, and Tey Liangwei.

Welcome to our podcast session today.

Before I start getting both of them to introduce themselves, in fact, I just wanted to thank Huawei for inviting Horangi to their recent Huawei event in MBS. It was well organized, really nice. And we managed to get to meet all the partners and customers around the country and around the region. Really good to meet everyone face to face. We managed to share what Horangi is doing in the event as well. We manage to get the interview session as well. You can reach out to Huawei Cloud APAC on LinkedIn to see more of our VP of Product, Raph's interview. Thank you very much for inviting us. Great event!

So I will get Dennis and Liangwei to briefly introduce themselves.

Dennis

Hey, hi Daniel. Thanks for having us. Thanks Horangi for giving us the opportunity to be on this broadcast. I think Horangi have been in the partnership with us helping us on the compliance for our cloud tenders. I believe that is a fantastic, so called a heavily made partnership, I would say, if you allow me to say so.

Let me do a quick intro. So I'm Dennis, I'm the Country Cybersecurity and Privacy Officer for Huawei Singapore.

Liangwei

Morning, everyone.

So thanks again, Daniel and team for organizing this and sharing the stage with us. So thanks Dennis. So Dennis very kindly agreed to share this session with me as well. I'm not a CISO or anything. I'm actually taking care of cloud partnerships in Singapore. So I handle all the cloud partners that we have for Huawei Cloud in Singapore.

So a lot of people might be asking what exactly is Huawei cloud. So hopefully this is something we can cover in the next couple of minutes.

My name is Liangwei. I've been in Huawei for almost two years. So glad to be here. And like Dennis mentioned, our relationship or partnership with Horangi has been nothing but positive over the past one to two years. I think this sentiment is echoed throughout our APAC region in fact, and personally, I can share some instances, more specifically back home in Singapore and then of course, Daniel and the rest of the team also does a lot more with the rest of our, my counterparts across the region.

So I think so far has been very positive and like Daniel mentioned, special thanks to joining our APAC event, I think just two weeks ago. It was a very good event, a lot of positive feedback from partners, customers. I think a lot of partners and customers say that wow, this is the first big event that they attended over in over two years.

So we welcomed over 2000 onsite attendees and tens of thousands of online attendees. I think it was a very great session. And then of course, a lot of cocktails, a lot of networking and a lot of product sharing and business sharing.

Yeah.

I think there's hopefully in the near future, we have more of such big events together with Horangi, and I'm sure that is something that will happen.

Daniel

Hey, thanks Liangwei. Thanks, Dennis, for the brief intro.

So Dennis, can you share more on Huawei's journey with the local regulators?

Dennis

Yeah, sure. Thanks Daniel.

I think it has been a fantastic one year, I should say fruitful, journey with the local authorities and regulators itself. I think everyone knows that Singapore is a rule-based society. So our regulator is doing a good job and then keeping up with all the CSP that include Huawei Cloud itself. So what we, what we do is that since from last year, we have been working closely with the local regulator called Cyber Security Agency of Singapore, CSA for short.

So last year we have embarked on the partnership program with CSA, which is an initiative from CSA themself. What we do is that we want to have a common objective to raise awareness, to basically to allow the SMB SMB in Singapore to take a closer look, how are they doing in term of cyber posture itself?

I guess today, everyone know that over the two years of pandemic, a lot of journey, actually, a lot of companies actually have embarked their digitalization plan and needless to say that going on the cloud is definitely one of their strategy in most of the companies plan itself. So with this, as everyone know that today, as we speak, there's a lot of risk and threats around in the society itself. We are talking about data privacy, misconfiguration, malware attacks, and so on and so forth.

There's so much more that we can talk about in term of risks for cybersecurity. And it's a, and we all know that cybersecurity is about shared responsibilityshared responsibility, not just only for Cloud Service Provider like Huawei, but as well as for our regulator and our customer as well.

So that's the reason why that Huawei have embarked on this partnership program with CSA, where we actually get CSA to come in to take a closer look, to do a baselining, to see, you know, whatever security feature that is made available on Huawei Cloud. Is it in line? Is it able to help our cloud tenant? And of course, SME is one of the cloud tenant that we have on our cloud itself. Whether are we doing enough to so-called to allow the SME to improve the cyber posture itself.

And also, this is the reason why I believe that we exactly, we have partnership with Horangi to help us on this topic itself. How to help our SMEs to improve their cybersecurity posture. And one of them definitely is to look into compliance itself.

Daniel

Okay. Thanks, Dennis,

Can you share more on so far did Huawei embark to any Cyber Essentials mark?

Dennis

Thanks for raising this.

I think as some of you had know if you're following closely on the CSA program, just only on the 29 March itself, indeed CSA had launched their Cyber Essentials mark program and Cyber Essentials Trust. On this program itself, Huawei Cloud is actually very honored to be one of the so-called the certified product, a qualified product under the Cyber Essentials scheme, where our customer who is actually already on Huawei Cloud can actually get the help of a third- party certification body that's endorsed by CSA to actually to do a audit and check.

It could be a desktop exercise, could be going through a checklist itself.

To see, to allow our Cloud customer to see how are they doing in term of their cybersecurity posture itself. Have they been protecting the data enough? Have they have all the employee in the, company or in the organization having basic knowledge on cyber hygiene. So all these are part and parcel of the CSA Cyber Essential mark program itself.

And I will say that I'm very glad that Huawei is actually able to be embark on this same Cyber Essentials mark program with CSA. And I hope that we can do more in terms of cybersecurity for our Cloud customer, our Cloud tenant so that, you know, they can actually just focus on doing their business, or doing their own business development and leave some of their cybersecurity to Huawei Cloud itself to let us think on their behalf to see, you know, how can we provide a safer landscape for them?

Daniel

Do you have any engagement with IMDA or MAS throughout this journey so far? Do you have any?

Dennis

Oh, actually. Yeah.

So we also have embarked another, I would say, partnership with IMDA in particular to protect, data protection. As some of you know that actually in Singapore, data protection, the regulator is actually an agency under IMDA itself, which is called PDPC, data protection commission. So basically Huawei back in this year, again in February itself, we have been certified with DPTM, which stand for Data Protection Trustmark. So this, what does it mean?

So it means that Huawei as a whole, as an organization, we have our best practices. We actually have done our part to ensure that our customer data have been well protected and able to satisfy what the regulator is looking at in term of being a service provider itself.

Daniel

Thanks for sharing

Do you have any Huawei cybersecurity best practices to share with our audience today?

Dennis

Right.

I think Huawei have been many years in the ICT business. Of course today we have a lot of best practices and indeed, I would say that Huawei is probably one of the vendor that actually believe a lot, or indeed, actually we do our own baselining based on international standard itself. Things like, for example, adopting best practices from the ISO standard.

So basically Huawei last year, back in, somewhere in Q3, itself, indeed, we have even launched our own whitepaper, our own whitepaper regarding about Huawei's security baseline, because a lot of people know us that we are a product manufacturer. We manufacture our own product for the telecoms, for cloud, for enterprise customer itself. But how does the end-user know that, you know, is Huawei doing enough to own our product in term of, from the R&D stage down to the, down to the stage where they receive the product or from the shelf or from our delivery itself, can this product be trusted?

So basically on this whitepaper that we have published on our website itself is available for download. In this whitepaper itself, we actually share extensively how Huawei actually put in our best practices from the day we conceptualize on our product down to the end of the tail line, whereby the product's out in the market itself, and Huawei will work on this baseline whereby, alright, at every, there's a few checkpoint within our R&D processes where we need to ensure that this product is safe, alright, to be market before then we will place out in the market for sale or else. actually, our HQ will actually not hesitate to stop and to re-review on the product security on the safeness to use before we make sure that this product is being rolled out to the market.

Daniel

Great. Great.

Last question for you. Do you embrace any compliances on Huawei cloud?

Dennis

Okay. So Huawei cloud, we, since the day we started our business in Singapore itself as a service provider, we actually have IMDAIMDA and that's where we obtain our MTCS level three. That's the highest level of security certification for multitier cloud security itself. And of course, along with that Huawei Cloud also venture into the finance sector itself. That's whereby we're actually right now looking at how to make sure that our cloud compliance is able to adhere to some of the MAS guideline and as well as today, because we are talking about eCommerce, a lot of business have been done online itself.

So today Huawei Cloud, we are also PCI compliancePCI compliance that's to ensure that any of the credit card information, any of the user inform ... personal information itself is properly being protected itself.

Daniel

Yeah.

Let me add a little bit more cause we're working very closely with Huawei Cloud as well, especially on compliances. And I think all of you know that Horangi do a lot of compliances as well on the CSPMCSPM module. So in fact, we work very closely with Huawei HQ and in fact, I think at the early start of end of last year, we actually worked with HQ to come up with this Huawei Cloud Security Configuration Best Practices.

Of course, this is a live document we will update on as there's a new version whatsoever. So we actually embedded this into Huawei Cloud compliances already.

Now this is a very unique one because all Huawei Cloud customers, once they are on Huawei Cloud, they can just run these compliances automatically when they click on it, then it will list down what are the compliances that they are not compliant to. Now this best practice actually based on CIS framework. Now there are a lot of customers that we went through, especially you can ask Liangwei, they are asking us whether are we, you know, do have any CIS framework or not. Actually, in fact, that framework that we work and make available in the Huawei Cloud, it's referred to CIS framework.

Now on top of that, just now Dennis mentioned about PCI DSS, we just launched last week PCI DSS in Huawei Cloud as well. So again, same, same. What, what we will do is as long as customer go to the compliance module, right, and they just run the PCI DSS compliances, the customer will know whether are they, where are they? You know, how many percent more to reach fully compliance for PCI DSS? Now, that's what we do.

Of course, we also have like what Dennis was mentioning, right, on financial side, we do work with, we do work on this MAS TRMMAS TRM compliance as well Not only that, of course we do a lot of in-country compliances as well for Huawei Cloud.

Right, Liangwei? Are we doing that?

Liangwei

Yep. A hundred percent correct.

So maybe I hijack a little bit from Dennis's part. So I think our partnership has been nothing but positive so far.

A lot of people, internal people or our partners actually ask me, actually what is Horangi doing together with Huawei Cloud? So my answer to the team, right? It's always, Horangi is not like one of my other SI partners or MSP partners or ISVs, right? So they ... Horangi is not going to resell Huawei Cloud and bring in hundreds of millions of revenue for Singapore. I think this is something we always want to, want to be upfront about.

More importantly, right, Horangi has two roles to fulfill for our relationship, our partnership in Singapore.

So first of all of course will be the consulting piece. I think this essentially it's ... I think when you ask Horangi people, right? Horangi people will also tell you the business. Horangi itself has two main pillars. One would be the consulting part. Maybe Daniel, you correct me if I'm wrong. One would be the consulting part one would be the product part, right?

So both of these are actually very dear to us when it comes to getting customers onto Huawei Cloud.

Number one: in order to get customers to Huawei Cloud. First of all, Huawei Cloud being one of the newer cloud providers in town, a lot of customers will be like, Hey, is it safe? Does it comply to this? Does it comply to that? I need to make sure I comply to this ISO, from the customer perspective, I need to make sure I comply to MAS TRM or PCI whatsoever. Having Horangi by our side, I think, Horangi is not someone that is coming in to sell, Hey, Huawei Cloud is good, you must move to Huawei Cloud. It's a, they are kind of like an independent assessor if you, if you will, to make sure that whatever we design for customers complies to whatever authority that they want to comply to. I think this is very important. And then customer having this neutral sound at the back of their head, right, saying, okay, at the end day, I think this one makes sense. This one complies to whatever we need to comply and then we can further proceed.

So I always tell the team, right, Horangi helps us accelerate customers adoption to, onto Huawei Cloud. Right? So they are kind of like an advisor to make sure whatever we design to customer, it makes sense for whatever standards that they want to go for.

Okay, so that's number one.

And then number two: when a customer eventually migrates to Huawei Cloud, which thankfully so far, we have a number of pretty decent use case with Horangi in Singapore, and, of course, definitely across the region. Once customer migrates onto Huawei Cloud, what then? So it's all about having the product side, which is the second pillar of Horangi, right?

So it's actually, that's the WardenWarden piece. That's where Warden has the multi-cloud monitoring platform or tool. And it's one of those multi-cloud tool that supports Huawei Cloud right now. Right? And then it does things like remediation, and if customer wants to gun for whatever ISO, it actually has a step-by-step guide, you need to do this, you need to do that.

So I think, first of all, Horangi is crucial to us in moving or accelerating customer to the cloud. And then second of all, making sure customers remains on Huawei Cloud. So this is what I always tell my partners, I always tell my internal colleagues what exactly Horangi is.

So Horangi is not a GSI that will bring us hundreds of millions. I think it's, more importantly, it's one of our support, our brother-in-arms. that help to accelerate our customers' migration to cloud. I think this one is more long-term, it's very meaningful as well.

Daniel

Thanks for your kind words. While you're on this topic, right, I think, wanted to, cause you'll be introducing more of the cloud, right? Would you want to share a bit of introduction of Huawei Cloud in Singapore and the market share so far?

Liangwei

Definitely. Thanks. Happy to, so I ... maybe for the listeners tuning in, a lot of people actually don't know the number of business units that we have, maybe this one Dennis should be the one doing, but maybe I hijack a little bit.

So Huawei has a number of business units. And then when I present to customers, right, usually they are pleasantly surprised to know that, Hey, I didn't know that you are in this space. I didn't know you're in this space because truth be told most people know Huawei as a mobile phone device manufacturer. Right.

Personally, before I joined Huawei, I also know Huawei as a mobile phone device manufacturer. So that is true. That's probably where we gain most of our fame from, and that is one of the business units that we have.

So number one, we started out day one as a carrier provider or carrier business. So that's back home in China. So that's since day one. And then since we are in the carrier business, we've been working with telco, large enterprises, government agencies in China.

The second one, second business unit, second business that we go to, it kind of complements the carrier business, which is our consumer business. That is where I would say again where most people know Huawei from. So that's where we have our mobile devices. And then more recently we have our devices, like consumer device, like wearables, smart watches, even things like weighing scales and so on and so forth. So that is something that is seeing a lot of traction. In fact, maybe I throw a statistic out. Dennis, please correct me if I'm wrong. I hear that in terms of wearable devices, we are actually the number one globally in terms of units shipped, that it's even bigger than a lot of the famous brands that you probably hear of, when it comes to wearables like smart watches, trackers and so on.

Correct, Dennis?

Dennis

Yeah.

Liangwei, you are not wrong. I believe that our China market constitutes quite a huge portion of this shipment itself. I think everyone knows that you are talking about global context. Actually, well, needless to say, China will always be one of the bigger market, at least comparing that to Singapore itself, I would say.

Liangwei

Yeah.

So I think other than that, we have our wireless earbuds, which is doing really well in Singapore as well and across the region. And then essentially this is all part of our consumer team.

And then moving on, this is the third business unit that I always like to talk about and customers are usually pleasantly surprised to know that I didn't know you are in this business, which is called enterprise business group.

Yeah. Enterprise business, essentially it constitutes everything that you can think of when it comes to on-prem infrastructure, enterprise infrastructure - our storage, our network devices, our transmission, our intelligent displays, our smart vision, i.e. CCTVs and so on and so forth.

So every time I present to customers, I didn't know you're in this space. I didn't know you have storage. In fact, our storage is, a shameless plug again, our storage is among the market leaders when it comes to offline storage. Yeah. So I think this is one of our hero products that is ... the general consensus in the market not only back in China, but in Singapore, we have a lot of very big customers that are on our offline storage. I think the general consensus is that it is a very, very strong product, right?

So this is enterprise storage and then our fourth business unit, which is the second youngest one, is where I'm from, it's Huawei Cloud. So Huawei Cloud, on a global perspective, we are only five years old. In Singapore, we are into our fourth year. We started in early 2019 so we are still quite a young baby, but that hasn't stopped us from growing into one of the biggest cloud providers in the world already. And then I will come back to Huawei Cloud in a couple of minutes time.

But last but not least is I want to introduce our little brother, our new baby in the whole family, which is our fifth business unit, which is called, known as Digital Power. Digital power is actually spun off from our enterprise business group in the second half of last year, 2021, it became its own business unit. I think this is testament to the direction that Huawei wants to go when it comes to having digital power and sustainable energy as its own core focus.

So I'm sure everyone here last year, that Huawei launched a electric vehicle, solar panel, solar power and so on. Right. So one thing to note, we do not manufacture electric vehicle. We essentially produce, provide the heart and the soul of the vehicle, which is essentially around our Harmony OS, our Huawei Cloud and our IOT devices. So there's a lot of very interesting videos that you see, self-driving of our EV in the road. So hopefully it can come to Singapore soon because I think it's, the price is quite interesting. Quite competitive. So in a nutshell, this is our fifth business unit.

So overall, so this is every time when I talk to customers or partners, this a quick introduction of the various business units that we have, what we do and what we are able to provide here. So back to Huawei cloud ...

Daniel

I was about ask you about the Huawei cloud. You go ahead.

Liangwei

So back to Huawei cloud, right? So I've been in Huawei cloud for almost two years. I'm glad to be one of the so-called pioneer. When I joined Huawei as part of the Huawei Cloud team, I think I was like the ninth or 10th person. So our team has since grown several times just for Huawei Cloud alone. So I think the momentum will definitely continue. In fact, I keep seeing new colleagues joining recently. So I think the momentum has been very encouraging.

Like I mentioned earlier, we are definitely the fastest-growing cloud provider in the world. On the official perspective, I'll give you some statistics again, back home in China, we are officially the second biggest infrastructure as a service public cloud provider by market share. So of course our big brother, can I say their name? I think everyone knows, it's still up there and we are definitely eating into their market share.

Hopefully ... I understand that our leadership's goal is to become the big brother, hopefully by 2025. I think with the momentum, that's something that is very attainable. And then on a global perspective, this is something that Gartner says it's not something that Huawei Cloud says: in terms of global infrastructure as a service provider by market share, Huawei Cloud is now officially number 5.

So of course behind our brothers that have been in the market for far longer than we have, I think for, for a cloud provider that's essentially five years old, I think that's very encouraging. So hopefully in the coming years, together with valuable partners like Horangi, we can consolidate and become our top four or maybe top three, which is maybe not nice, like, because I know Horangi does work with several other top providers.

So in terms of presence, I maybe spend a couple seconds. Singapore presence alone, we have five availability zones, which is essentially data centers. We launched our fifth public cloud AZ at the end of April. So now, just for Huawei Cloud public cloud users, we have five AZs that is servicing them already. So don't have to worry about things like data sovereignty, data residency. You don't have to worry about data being backed up into other countries unless of course, that's something you want, but that can be done.

But other than that, don't have to worry about that. So data residency and sovereignty is something very close to Dennis' heart and something very close to Singapore government's heart as a whole, right. And recently even countries like Thailand are starting to look at data sovereignty, PDPA, and so on. Very serious perspective.

So in a nutshell, that is Huawei Cloud.

So in terms of wins, maybe in a while, I can briefly cover what we have done together with Horangi.

Daniel

Thanks for taking time to introduce Huawei as a whole, and also share a bit on the market share of Huawei Cloud.

Actually, we give you five minutes here. Actually we wanted ... can you share Huawei Cloud's unique selling proposition or competitive advantage?

Liangwei

Wow. Good question. Hard to answer also.

So a lot of customers actually ask me. I think first of all, for better or worse, right, Singapore is relatively westernized in a sense. We are relatively, very tech-savvy, right? So a lot of customers already know what public cloud is, already know what Infrastructure-as-a-Service, Platform-as-a-Service Software-as-a-Service, already know what all these are.

So it's no longer ... right now, the question is no longer about, oh, should I migrate from on-prem to cloud? I think right now most people are already on cloud on one form of another on cloud. So a lot of partners and customers actually ask me, so what is Huawei Cloud compared to company, cloud provider X?

Of course they have been in the market for longer. I already have my workload on that provider. So what's so special about that? So this is same thing that I presented during our APAC event as well.

One, we do have several competitive, I would say advantage like competitive factors that I like to talk to customers and partners about. One that I always talk about, never fail to talk about is the fact that Huawei is more than just a, way more than just a public cloud provider. So I'm privileged to be able to call upon the expertise of all those business units that I mentioned, like our storage, our brothers and sisters from storage, from intelligent vision, from digital power, from our private cloud team, from our cloud stack team and so on and so forth.

And together, we are able to weave together a solution that kind of tackles exactly what our customer wants to do, which is to solve a challenge, solve a pain point. So some of the biggest wins in fact, over the past 12, 18 months were exactly like that.

So for example, we have education customers that, that kind of, there was a project that involved CCTV, storage, and Huawei Cloud. So essentially they wanna make into a kind of like a surveillance solution. And so I think this is something that Huawei, compared to the other cloud providers, is something that always is uniquely positioned to do. We have our CCTV, we have our on-prem storage. We have our cloud. We have everything in between to weave the whole solution together. And you don't have to worry about things like interoperability, cost efficiency, right? That's one thing. Definitely, we can work with our storage, definitely, Huawei Cloud can work with our CCTVs, and so on.

I think this is one of the value that we always like to talk about to our customer, and true to that, the past 12 to 18 months, some of the biggest wins were exactly like that. So weaving together various Huawei products into a solution to solve our customer's needs, right? Because if I go and talk to a customer about our VMs, our storage, our object storage, our storage buckets, I think by the third slide, they probably turn off already.

So usually when we talk to customers about Huawei Cloud, we try to understand what do they wanna solve. And then if in the event that we don't have a product that is able to solve whatever solution, chances are our ecosystem partner is able to solve that. So that is our second point. So our, we have thankfully built a rather robust partner ecosystem. And of course, Horangi is one of our core cogs in the whole ecosystem machine.

So chances are on, especially on things like on the application layer, we rely heavily on our ecosystem partners, our ISV partners.

So just couple of months ago, we actually met an F&B customer and they said that, Hey, I wanna do something like data analysis, business intelligence, and so on and so forth. I have 20 years worth of PoS data. Is that something that you guys can do? So, first of all, we don't have that, that application layer, that product, but we do have a partner that does that. And then we came in, we provide the storage bucket and so on and the connectivity and together, we were able to weave together a solution that is right now deployed, and customer is so far happy with it.

So I think this is two points that I always like to talk about. Other than that we of course do have other benefits, for example, like right now, customer, like I mentioned at the start, right, customer is no longer talking about whether or not to migrate to cloud. Customer right now, thankfully, starting to see, appreciate the value about having, adopting a multi-cloud strategy.

I'm already on another cloud. Do I really want to put everything onto one cloud provider? What if tomorrow someone is in a bad mood and fires off a tweet and then something happens, right? Everything goes down. I think this is something that is very real right now. And then even governments like Singapore is starting to know that, oh, we shouldn't put everything into one basket. We shouldn't bet everything onto one house.

So Huawei being Huawei Cloud and being Huawei and all, we are definitely a very valuable option in customers' multi-cloud strategy. We have some AZs that some of our brothers don't have. Of course, some of them have AZs that we don't have in, we don't have presence in, so we are always very transparent to customer. Hey, for example, this country, we don't have AZ, maybe you consider this provider, but definitely back home in China, especially if you wanna connect back home in China. I think this is something we can definitely provide a lot of good value in and more importantly, I think because APAC and China is very crucial market for a lot of large enterprises and for banks, for universities, for government agencies, for whatever the business is, the organization is, if they do want have a secure connection back to China, I think this is something that we can uniquely provide versus our, some of our other brothers.

So just in a nutshell, hopefully I spent more than five minutes. in a nutshell, this is some of the very, at the top of my head, some of the factors that I always talk to customers about that.

Daniel

Okay. Thanks, Liangwei.

Anything you wanna say, Dennis?

Dennis

I think Liangwei put out a few very good points. Thank you.

Frankly speaking, We believe actually, as we speak today, I think a lot of people is already using multiple cloud. When talking about multiple cloud itself, like, you know, just happened to be recently, I have a coffee chat with my friend. So he's, I think today some of the users or some of the customers too, like my friend asking ... but you see put my asset onto the cloud itself is it's not like on-prem where I can feel, I can touch my set and I can harden the hardware, some stuff like that to make sure that cybersecurity is being done.

But everything on the cloud. So it's like, can see, cannot touch it. It's not so real though. So how I ensure that security is being enforced? So there at the coffeeshop, actually, I've been sharing with my friend that, well, this is why there's this thing called the Cloud Security Posture Management, I believe, and that's exactly what Warden's doing.

Daniel

Yes, it is.

Dennis

So basically how this tool will help for organization is actually to ensure to do a check whether, how robust is the cyber posture across on the entire development life cycle? Without this organization having their own expertise. Put it that way, today, we all know that, you know, talent is hard to find. That's one problem.

One side, second thing, itself, to plant a expertise in your own organization, sometime it may be not so practical. So today that we are talking about a lot thing is as-a-service. Indeed. I think recently Huawei also on a few of our summit, we've been pushing this concept to worldwide that everything is as-a-service itself, CTO could be as a service itself. So is security, also could be as-a-service itself.

I think exactly ... that's why Huawei today, we will, for the benefit of our customer, you know, we will go out and reach out to the best of the breed eco-partners like even Horangi to make sure that we bring benefit back to our customer and they feel safe whenever they use, for example, Huawei cloud services itself.

So today actually what I say that CSPM for cloud security posture management itself is actually a key important IT security tool, basically for the organization to identify any misconfiguration issue, any compliance risk. And I believe Horangi is probably one of the better partners that we bring on, on top of our platform today.

Daniel

Thanks, Dennis, for the kind words as well.

I want to wrap this up with one more question for both of you, in fact, throughout your journey, be it with the local regulator for Dennis, right?

And for Liangwei, for your Huawei cloud journey, what are the challenges that you face, and how do you mitigate, or how do you or your team mitigate along this journey?

Can you share a bit on this?

Dennis

Maybe I start first, Daniel. So I believe, that's why, today, this podcast, I invite my colleague, Liangwei, to come because I believe that till today, a lot of audience out there listening to us right now may not fully understand Huawei organization, the sort of business that we offer. Actually, indeed, it could be exactly the same question in the back of the minds of our regulators in Singapore, for example.

So precisely, I think we need to, we need to voice out. We need to front them. We need to engage. OK, for my part, with the various regulators. So it's not just only CSA. It will be IMDA, GovTech, and the rest of the folks in the public sector itself, because we believe that trust, trust need to build up over time itself and how we do, how do we build trust?

Trust can be built over partnership itself because partnership is where we will work together with the regulator. And also during the partnership, the regulator, while working with us, were able to understand, oh, so this is our business model. Okay. So this is the architecture we're looking at and Huawei, you have your own set of best practices when come to cybersecurity itself.

So over time, what we hope is that we can build up trust with everyone. Not only just with the regulator, but as well with our customer, so that they feel safe. They feel they have, they do have the confidence to use our services.

Daniel

Yeah. Thanks, Dennis.

Liangwei

That's a great question, Daniel.

So in terms of challenges that we have faced from the cloud side, right? I think right now what Huawei Cloud is still relatively new in the market. I think even though we say that we are four years old, but we landed in Singapore right after the whole, unfortunately, GCC 1.0 thing. And then a lot of customers when I meet right, they say, Hey, how come you're not on GCC?

I think the answer is not because we are not good enough. Essentially, the answer is very simple: we missed the boat.

So right now, Dennis and our leadership, they are doing a lot of groundwork to make sure we actually have a chance when it comes to the GCC, the next one, so eventually when it does happen. So other than that, I think in terms of our non-government customers and our non-government teams, our commercial teams, our SMB teams, FSI and and so on, the past two years, based on my experience back because I have been doing Huawei Cloud for almost two years, there's still a lot of education involved.

Like Dennis mentioned, a lot of customers are still kind of probing what exactly is Huawei Cloud? Is it safe? Is it good? Is it, what, what can I, what's the difference between that and what I'm already using now?

So there's a lot of education, a lot of introduction involved, even when I look at recruiting new partners, right? There's still a lot of this notion that customers are still kind of figuring out. Thankfully over the past 12 months, the customers are starting to hear about Huawei cloud. We do have customers and partners that are starting to proactively find out more about us from our partners. And then thanks to our very strategic partnership with partners like Horangi and some of our global SI, we are starting to generate a bit of very good noise.

I like to say noise, generate a bit of buzz in the market, right? So over the past 12 months, we have seen a number of big tender wins, big tender project wins. So a lot of customers will be like, oh, do you only service Chinese enterprises?

The answer is yes and no.

Of course, when our big, large customer Chinese enterprises want to come to the region, naturally they will partner with an organization that's already in the market, in this area, right in this region. And Huawei is definitely them, one of them. So, yes, when we first started out, we have a lot of large Chinese enterprises as our customers, but over the past two years, thankfully, we've seen a lot of local customers coming on board. So some universities that are already adopting Huawei Cloud right now, we won a couple of tenders, some logistics company, F&B company, private healthcare companies.

And more importantly, with partnership with Horangi, we've seen quite a bit of wins in, especially the FSI industry, right? We have our traditional banks, our local banks. We have our digital banks InsureTech companies, FinTech companies that are already starting to trust their workload to be on Huawei Cloud.

So this momentum is something we fully expect to continue, and then we will not stop doing our, whatever we need to do to generate as much buzz as possible. I think right now, customers are starting to hear about us and know about us. And we've ongoing events like our APAC event, whichever event that is upcoming. I think hopefully starting to get more and more, garner more and more interest for Huawei Cloud. So in terms of challenges, yes, we need to, of course go into the ground, really talk to our customers, really convince them that, Hey, coming onto Huawei CLoud, it's a very good option for your workloads. And it's definitely safe. It definitely complies to whichever regulation you want to because we have an advisor like Horangi by our side.

Daniel

Mm-hmm Just to add on that, right?

In fact, we work very closely with Huawei Cloud Singapore in fact, and the rest of the regional countries as well, in country as well. So we work very closely with Huawei Cloud to do POC together most of the time. So when the moment Huawei Cloud has done their POC, then we will be doing the POC together to ensure that from security perspective cloud infrastructure layer perspective, we are covered. So that's what we do together with Huawei a lot.

I think that's all for today's session. Thanks for your time to join us. Great, great insights of Huawei Singapore, cybersecurity, and privacy journey from Dennis and also insights from Huawei Cloud Singapore journey by Liangwei.

Thank you both of you.

Take care, everyone.

Liangwei

Thank you.

Dennis

Be safe.