by SAVIOUS KWINIKA
JOHANNESBURG, (CAJ News) – BANKS and other financial service companies across Africa are positioned to embrace a digital-first approach that will enable them to remain competitive.
This after Huawei launched its MEGA ICT infrastructure package solution for the local market.
MEGA ICT is an acronym and abbreviation, respectively, for “Multi-domain collaboration, End-to-end experience, Green and Autonomous” and Information and Communication Technology.
The package is designed to help banks meet their ICT requirements in order to achieve full digitalization. The solutions bundled in with MEGA include those that help reshape the computing power, storage and connectivity abilities of financial institutions, officials said.
KT Chen, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Huawei Global Digital Finance, explained that the nature of banking had fundamentally changed.
Infrastructure would be crucial to banks remaining relevant and competitive.
“Technology enables the whole of society and the economy, including the financial sector,” he said.
Chen added it was evolving all the time.
“Devices are changing and right now we’re having another iPhone moment with AI co-pilots,” he said.
MEGA ICT has been announced at the Huawei Intelligent Finance Summit for Africa 2023 in Cape Town.
“Today, data is really important to every bank, and everything can be automated,” said King Tsui, Chief Technology Officer, Global Digital Finance, Huawei.
He further explained how MEGA could help banks ensure that they had access to, and can take full advantage of, the data available to them, while also experiencing less downtime and being kinder to the planet.
The MEGA infrastructure package, according to officials, allows banks to better meet their infrastructure requirements and achieve high performance, high availability, high security, highly efficient operation and maintenance (O&M), and low carbon.
Those that adopt the package are forecast to be able to achieve non-stop digital service operation.
Huawei’s Storage-Network Coordination solution, for instance, reduces CPU read and write wait time of the application server from 17ms to less than 1ms in database applications.
The all-flash storage acceleration and network protocol acceleration, meanwhile, lowers application latency by 30 percent and increases the number of transactions per second (TPS) the organisation can handle by over 40 percent.
The package also aims to help banks achieve high digital infrastructure availability of their digital infrastructure.
Huawei introduced the industry’s first unified disaster recovery portfolio solution based on Storage-Optical Connection Coordination, which shortens the I/O switchover from 120 seconds to two seconds in case of a faulty transmission line, ensuring zero transaction failure and 24/7 online digital services for financial customers.
Bill Rafterty, Senior Vice President of Huawei’s Data Storage Research Centre, believes this is the kind of performance that banks would have to make the norm if they are to compete with fintechs.
“If you don’t think the threat of fintechs is real. There is no such thing as downtime anymore. High availability is where you need to go and where you need to go now,” Rafterty said.
– CAJ News