Guotai Epoint: Digital Government Efficiency with Cloud DC + e-Government Cloud Platform

Anyang is a prefecture-level city in China’s Henan province and is considered one of the eight ancient capitals of China, and a cultural birthplace of Chinese civilization. Today, the city is an important industrial and food production base in the province. Bordering the Taihang Mountains to the west and a vast plain to its east, Anyang sits on major inter-provincial highways connecting four provinces. As a regional modern transportation hub and popular tourist city, it is also home to one of the largest and fastest prefecture city-level e-Government cloud data centers — the first in China to comply with L3 security specifications.

New Demands for Government Information Services

With the rapid advancement of information technologies, such as cloud computing and big data, the focus of digitization in cities has shifted from digitizing government services, to digitizing various industries and upgrading already digitized services. Government services, city governance, and people’s livelihoods all pose new demands for government information services. Government digitization faces the following four challenges: 1) how to further consolidate government resources; 2) how to uniformly manage basic data; 3) how to improve public services in cities; and 4) how to improve government efficiency.

Originally, Anyang faced the following challenges during its digitization efforts: 1) repetitive and wasteful investments, 2) low resource utilization, 3) inconsistent standards, 4) ineffective system integration, 5) inability to uniformly manage data resources, and 6) substandard public services in cities. From the outset, the Anyang Municipal Government recognized the importance of addressing these challenges. Having established digitization as a top-level strategy to drive modernization, the Anyang government reached out to leading providers for digitization solutions. In 2016, the work report delivered by Anyang’s Municipal Government, together with the 13th Five Year Plan for Economic and Social Development of Anyang, established a plan to build a unified cloud Data Center (DC) and various cloud platforms, and to develop a number of necessary cloud services.

Huawei-Guotai Epoint Joint Innovation Solution

Huawei and Jiangsu Guotai Epoint Software Co., Ltd. (Guotai Epoint) built an e-Government cloud platform for Anyang, with the goal of centralizing service resources and driving service innovation with big data. The cloud platform implements a six-layer architecture based on the typical needs of government services, including high stability, high performance, high security, and large-capacity storage. The six layers are: user, service, application, application support, information resource, and infrastructure. To ensure the overall security and data standardization of Anyang’s e-Government services, both an information security management system and data standardization system have been established for each layer. The e-Government cloud interconnects with the application systems of different governmental units, bureaus, and departments through standard Application Programming Interfaces (APIs).

Huawei leveraged its extensive experience in building cloud infrastructure when it provided both the software and hardware for the solution’s underlying cloud infrastructure. In 2015, Huawei delivered the cloud infrastructure for Anyang’s Big Data Center and Cloud Command Center. Together, these centers won the Cloud DC Outstanding Solution Award and Cloud DC Outstanding Innovation Award at the 7th China Cloud Computing Summit.

Guotai Epoint provided the upper-layer applications for this project. Guotai Epoint has long been dedicated to providing e-Government and comprehensive digitization solutions for government services, as well as developing new government service models as needs evolve. Highlights of this project include:

• Data integration and sharing between governmental bureaus, offices, and departments in Anyang.Guotai Epoint and Huawei built a basic public database and public information platform, re-categorized Anyang’s government information resources, and established city-wide technical standards and management regulations for information assets.
• Unified management of basic data. Guotai Epoint and Huawei built a public database to systematically collect, store, and manage basic data from various governmental bureaus, offices, and departments.
• Improved public services in cities.Guotai Epoint and Huawei built a uniform information disclosure platform and service portal. The city service platform on WeChat and the e-Government portal are the most direct ways to view the results of application, data, and resource integration. The platform and portal allow the public and other governmental units to access city applications. They also upgrade the public services provided by the government and other social organizations.
• Improved government efficiency. Guotai Epoint and Huawei built a basic public database, government resource catalog, and data interface system to drive data integration and sharing, which further promotes interdepartmental collaboration. The unified portal improves interactions between the government and the public. Feedback from the public about governmental services also helps improve these services.

Joint Innovations Serve More Industries

By deploying the right Huawei products and solutions during different phases of the Anyang e-Government cloud project, the Huawei and Guotai Epoint joint solution delivers a remarkable user experience, with high availability and simplified management. Anyang’s e-Government big data platform was officially launched in July 2017. By the end of December 2018, this platform had collected 43.5 million data records for 3,109 categories across 73 departments. Four basic databases — population, legal person, economy, and geography — have already been established, providing key support for both the public and social services of the Anyang government. This joint solution also provides big data support for various innovative government application systems used in Anyang city, laying a digital foundation for local governments to rapidly expand their public-serving application platforms.

This joint solution provides the following data support for Anyang’s digital government and social services:

• Support for online service platforms serving citizens and businesses.These online service platforms provide services customized by the government information resource center. Their benefits include: citizens and businesses do not need to fill out any forms; their certificates and electronic photos can be used across all platforms; when registering a company, the system sends messages telling users about nearby businesses in the same industry, which helps to foster a favorable ‘soft’ environment for economic growth.
• Support for a converged citizen service platform.This platform serves as a portal to various public services, such as housing fund query, traffic violation query and payment, social insurance query and payment, and personal credit query. Overall public satisfaction is improved by providing comprehensive life services.
• Support for grid-based services and management platform.This basic public database provides geographic data used to divide the city into cells on a gridded map. This database also provides demographic data related to public security, civil affairs, family planning, and real estate. By associating this data with target grid cells, civil workers now work more efficiently.

The Huawei and Guotai Epoint joint solution for the Anyang e-Government cloud is the result of the deep integration of both companies’ technologies. The collaboration proves the exceptional innovative capabilities of these two providers in both the technology and business realms. Looking forward, Huawei and Guotai Epoint will continue to iterate, upgrade, and optimize this joint solution by leveraging the latest technologies. The two providers are laser-focused on customer needs, and plan to use this solution to serve more industry customers.