Cloud Enablement Service Extends Shanghai e-Government Platform

Background

By adopting Huawei’s Industry Cloud Enablement Service Solution, officials in Shanghai hope to integrate service applications, as well as the software and hardware resources of various government departments. In the construction of a city and district-level e-government cloud platform, local authorities decide to apply advanced concepts and technologies, such as cloud computing and big data. The platform is being built with an architecture that is based on cloud-network integration and cloud-data collaboration, concentrating on a strategy that focuses on the importance of efficiency, sharing and openness, security and reliability, and on-demand services. As a result, the following objectives can be achieved for different government departments: infrastructure co-building and sharing, information system deployment, data resource aggregation and sharing, and effective collaboration of service applications. Together, these help to develop government big data and put it to good use. Finally, yet importantly, governance and public services can become more efficient.

Challenges

Uncoordinated information silos

At City Hall, the application systems within one department or between multiple departments, are isolated from each other, making it hard to streamline processes and share data. As a result, collaboration is almost impossible. What’s more, expanding services is difficult, and rolling out new applications and performing fault recovery are time-consuming, leading to poor usability and greatly affecting the government’s efficiency and decision-making abilities.

Inefficient and repeated construction

The equipment rooms, hardware and software devices of different departments are often built time and time again, and typically with a traditional silo-based architecture that lacks flexibility and sharing potential. As a result, resource utilization is poor, and it is uneven at peak and off-peak hours. Operating costs are also high, which makes further investment unattractive.

Poor information security

Information security is difficult to guarantee, mainly because of the risks that increase over time. In some important information systems, many of which impact the economic lifelines of China, the proportion of Chinese software and hardware is low, with non-competitive intellectual property products. Information security architecture is also not perfect, and graded protection is substandard.

High maintenance costs

Maintenance costs are high, the workloads are heavy, and there is a general lack of Operations and Maintenance (O&M) personnel, which together result in the absence of a centralized maintenance capabilities. In addition, O&M processes are not standardized, meaning that faults can easily occur that consequently interrupt services.

Solution

By trying to remain both centralized and distributed, the government provides services for different departments, purchasing services and relying on the e-government extranet. To make full use of its existing infrastructure, the cloud sub-center construction and reconstruction solution will be implemented in accordance with the relevant standards and regulations, forming around five cloud sub-centers. During this process, the existing service scale, equipment room environment, technical strengths, and line requirements will be fully taken into account. The cloud centers will be gradually integrated into Shanghai’s cloud center. The 16 district governments will all independently build their district-level cloud, which are then logically integrated into the city cloud. The city will finally form a two-level city/district cloud system. China Telecom and China Mobile, serving as cloud service providers for e-government cloud services in Shanghai, have constructed two cloud Data Center (DC) platforms to provide cloud services. In 2017, 150 to 200 service applications were migrated to the city cloud; and by 2020, all government service applications will have been migrated. The estimated scale of these applications is expected to be more than 500.

In the initial phase of the project, Huawei will adopt a new solution, which needs to be integrated with devices from 18 vendors, including IBM, F5, Redware, NSFOCUS, TOPSEC, Anheng, Weisi, 360, EISOO, and China Mobile Suzhou. The Huawei project team will coordinate with third-party vendors to obtain devices for verification in a mirrored environment. After that, the team will collaboratively develop solutions based on DC² 6.0, the world’s first DC² 6.0 + Agile Controller (AC) 3.0 networking solution.

To meet the service requirements of different government departments and effectively support the solution, Huawei’s cloud enablement team needed to perform in-depth service analysis based on the government service architecture. They also will extract common service requirements, establish hierarchical service catalogs, and provide an end-to-end cloud enablement service solution.

1. Based on the user status and requirements, Huawei uses a modeling tool to perform detailed analysis and generate an evaluation report, guiding customers on how to smoothly and securely roll out services on the cloud, and providing customers with comprehensive evaluation services.

2. Based on customers’ requirements for cloud platform construction, Huawei provides cloud planning, design, and implementation services with  analysis of the the following layers: infrastructure, resource, and application. Customers are provided with cloud platform solutions that focus on cloud-network integration and cloud-data coordination, helping to build high-quality cloud platforms fast.

3. Huawei provides customers with cloud migration services to meet their cloud migration requirements, using standardized migration processes that include survey, analysis, evaluation, design, verification, and migration implementation.

4. Huawei provides one-stop cloud Disaster Recovery (DR) solutions, such as DR consulting, DR system construction, and DR drills, reducing customers’ informatization costs and ensuring service continuity.

5. Huawei provides cloud security services in the form of a three-dimensional security protection system, helping customers cope with increasingly severe security threats, while also ensuring the secure and reliable running of services on the cloud.