Huawei Xinghe AI Unified SASE: Empowering Tanzania Immigration Service as East African Network Security Benchmark

The Tanzania Immigration Service Department coordinates more than 80 immigration branches across the country, handling core government services such as visa processing, facial and fingerprint collection, entry and exit registration, and border security. It serves as the core hub for national foreign security and immigration management. As Tanzania accelerates its digital government initiatives, several critical pain points have emerged. The legacy network security infrastructure can no longer support the high-security, high-reliability, and high-efficiency demands of digital immigration governance. These primary operational challenges include cumbersome deployment across distributed branch offices, frequent cross-border cyberattacks, and high complexity in remote O&M.

Three Core Security Bottlenecks Inhibiting Digital Progress for the Immigration Service Department

The nation's immigration checkpoints are highly decentralized. Many of these sites are located in remote border regions. As a result, a large number of branch offices have lacked adequate security hardware for a long time. The situation is further complicated by poor local network infrastructure. A shortage of specialized IT personnel also creates clear vulnerabilities. These vulnerabilities appear across three critical dimensions: branch deployment, cross-border security, and fault resolution. Together, they severely bottleneck the digital transformation of immigration governance.

Complex Deployment, High O&M cost, and Prolonged Delivery Cycles

Immigration branch offices are geographically dispersed, and many border sites are isolated in terms of transportation and network environment. As a result, traditional DHCP-based local deployment is not supported. The traditional deployment model requires technical staff to visit each site individually for manual policy configuration and testing. This process generates comprehensive costs—combining labor, vehicles, and travel—of over $500 USD per site. Completing the rollout across all branches takes at least five months. As a result, the return on investment (ROI) period is prolonged, new border sites and temporary inspection sites cannot be quickly deployed, and services such as emergency customs clearance and border inspection are severely affected.

Surge in Phishing Websites and Expanded Attack Surfaces

The Immigration Service Department operates more than 80 branch offices using local Internet breakouts without centralized security governance from headquarters. This decentralized model results in weak endpoint protection at individual sites, making it difficult to block phishing websites. According to public reports, a Tanzanian institution suffered a severe breach in May 2025 when a remote branch was compromised by cross-border hackers. The attackers used a phishing link to infiltrate the internal network and alter official public notices. This incident triggered a major government credibility crisis and serves as an urgent wake-up call for similar decentralized, multi-branch networking models.

Equipment Proliferation and High O&M Complexity

The network encompasses more than 200 diverse devices scattered across various branches, long lacking an integrated, unified management platform. The legacy O&M model forces personnel to log in to each device individually at every site for troubleshooting, configuration, maintenance, and fault localization. This fragmented workflow creates an immense workload. The total troubleshooting time per month exceeded 60 hours. This escalates O&M cost due to heavy reliance on manual labor and impacts core government functions, including visa processing and border verification.

Huawei Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution: Securing the Digital Transformation of the Immigration Service Department

Huawei Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution is built on an integrated intelligent security architecture that combines cloud, network, edge, and endpoint. It addresses the pain points, such as scattered immigration service outlets, remote locations, independent local breakouts, siloed management and control, high phishing risks, and high deployment and O&M costs. The solution provides networking-security convergence, AI-powered security, and unified O&M. This solution breaks away from the traditional siloed approach to networking, security, and O&M construction. It integrates simplified remote delivery, AI-powered intelligent threat prevention, and unified network-wide management and control. This enables fast branch rollout, intelligent risk blocking, and network-wide visibility and controllability, comprehensively and systematically helping the immigration department build a highly secure, efficient, and lightweight border security system.

• Email-based Deployment, Reducing Costs and Accelerating Delivery, and Eliminating the Need for Site Visits

Considering the lack of DHCP servers and poor accessibility in remote areas, the solution allows for remote zero-touch provisioning (ZTP) through email, eliminating the need for onsite commissioning. With this solution, network-wide devices can be onboarded in minutes and activated in batches. The overall deployment cost per site is reduced by 90%, and the network-wide delivery period is shortened by 60%. This greatly reduces labor, travel, and O&M costs.

• Reduced Exposure Surface and Enhanced Security

To address the risks of local breakout from branches, Huawei firewalls are equipped with the AI Core engine and inline AI URL filtering, which can block phishing websites within milliseconds and detect 95% of cross-border attacks.

• Unified O&M

An integrated management and control platform (NCE) is built to centrally manage, configure, and maintain over 200 networking and security devices on the entire network. The network digital map enables E2E link visualization and monitoring, reducing the fault troubleshooting time by 90%. This eliminates the need for inefficient device-by-device and site-by-site troubleshooting, greatly simplifying O&M and reducing workload. As a result, the digital office efficiency of the immigration department is significantly improved.

Huawei Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution precisely meets the core digitalization requirements of the Tanzania Immigration Service Department. It achieves a leapfrog network upgrade in terms of deployment efficiency, security protection, and O&M management. Moving forward, Huawei will deepen its collaboration with the customer and continuously optimize the nationwide network security and O&M architecture with its Xinghe AI Unified SASE Solution. The partnership will expand into full-scenario security capabilities, including intelligent border inspection systems, comprehensive data security protection, and intelligent endpoint protection. This initiative will fully accelerate the digital, secure, and intelligent upgrade of immigration governance. By establishing a network security and digitalization benchmark for East Africa, this project delivers a highly scalable, field-proven blueprint for large-scale network security construction and lightweight, intelligent O&M across multiple nations in Africa.