Driving Digital Economy Toward Thailand 4.0 with Huawei Cloud

Thailand Government has announced to move toward digital economy with Thailand 4.0 strategy. To drive digital economy toward Thailand 4.0, The National Digital Economy and Society Commission (NDESC), Ministry of Digital Economy and Society, Thailand (ONDE), declared at the recent MWC Shanghai 2021 virtual conference that it will focus on digital transformation an improving digital economy in Thailand. This added that it will concentrate on helping Thailand becoming a digital hub inASEAN. “We are developing the Thailand Digital Economy and Society Development Plan at national level”, Mrs.Vunnaporn Devahastin, Secretary-General of ONDE said. “The plan really offers a blueprint for revolutionizing government operations, business practices, and people’s lifestyles. It covers building a country-wide, high-capacity digital infrastructure to provide accessible and affordable internet, digital transformation through initiatives such as Digital SMEs, Digital Agriculture, and Digital Industry, and the collaboration with Huawei to open the 5G Ecosystem Innovation Center (EIC) in Bangkok last year.”

According to the Global Digital Report 2021, released by We Are Social in collaboration with Hootsuite, 70% of Thailand’s population were internet users in 2020, an increase of 7% from the previous year. With some 99% of the country’s population owning a smart phone device, Thai people also spend an average of 8 hours and 44 minutes on the internet each day. The report showed that Thailand was ranked third in the world for product purchases made through e-commerce, with 84% of the country’s population making such transactions, placing Thailand behind only Indonesia and the United Kingdom but above the global average of 77%. Kasikorn Research Centre estimates that Thailand’s cloud solution business was worth US$ 523 million in 2020, up 20% from the previous year and building on the 22% year-on-year growth in 2019. Kasikorn Research Centre forecast cloud business to grow by more than 8 % to US$ 570 million in 2021 in line with the ongoing uptake of digital tools. The reasonable cost of could services in Thailand also allows SMEs to access the services, increasing their competitive edges. As a result, the IT capacity of SMEs no longer falls far behind that of large corporations. As Thai businesses take on the challenge of offering a better service to their customers or end-users who have higher expectations, they are increasingly expected to adopt big data and analytics to help them differentiate their products and services from those of competitors.

To support Thailand digital economy, other than investing in 5G in Thailand, Huawei also invested in the 1^st Global Public Cloud Services and provided services in Thailand since September 2018. Till mid of year 2021, Huawei Cloud Thailand has two Availability Zones (Data Center Nodes) in Thailand and starts investing another 700 millions baht for third Availability Zone which will launch services on 3rd Availability Zone within year 2021. With Huawei Cloud locates in Thailand, customers would be able to provide the best network performance with latency less than 10 milliseconds to their customers’ in Thailand with low network connectivity cost, compare with other Global Public Cloud in other countries.

Customers as government, enterprise, SME and startups would be able to develop digital products and services and provide to their customers within Thailand and other countries globally. There are four types of cloud services that are available on Huawei Cloud in Thailand as:

1)     Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) which is cloud based services such as compute, storage and network infrastructure.

2)     Platform as a Service (PaaS) which provides platform for customers to develop and manage applications without having to build and maintain the infrastructure such as Relational Database Services - RDS, Cloud Container Engine - CCE (Managed Kubernetes services), Map Reduce Service – MRS (Big Data Service), ModelArts (Artificial Intelligence Services), etc.

3)     Software as a Service is software services model that provide services for customers to access applications over internet such as Thailand ID Card OCR, Image Recognition, Huawei Cloud Meeting, etc.

4)     Serverless Service which allow customers to develop applications and deploy functionalities without maintaining a server such as FunctionGraph (Serverless compute), API Gateway, Data Lake Insight – DLI (Serverless Big Data), etc.

Because of Huawei has experienced in both hardware and software technologies, we synergize both technologies into our Public Cloud Services to provide the best performance to customers. Customers have choice to select size and performance of the services such as compute, storage based on actual requirements and be able to modify the size when needed. Customers are not only be able to choose size and performance to run their codes on Huawei Cloud, they can run their codes without provisioning server at all with FunctionGraph. FunctionGraph is serverless compute service with high availability, highly scale and zero maintenance. Customers just write their codes and set the conditions to execute and only pay when they are executed. This would help customers run their applications with less cost.

Furthermore, customers can use PaaS to speed up the application development which Huawei Cloud has multiple PaaS services which would be able to help customers develop highly scale cloud native applications with ease. Huawei Cloud has multiple database for customers to select depends on the characteristic of the applications such as MySQL, and Microsoft SQL in Relational Database Service (RDS), MongoDB in Document Database Service (DDS). For customers that are currently run the applications in their own environment or other clouds, customers can simply use Huawei Cloud migration tools to migrate virtual machines, storage and database to Huawei Cloud.

Customers are able to use data to differentiate their products and services from competitors, Big Data and AI solutions would be keys success for this. Customers can use Big Data solutions on Huawei Cloud to pull the data from multiple sources into data lake on Huawei Cloud which store data on Object Storage Service with very high durability at 99.999999999%. With Map Reduce Service (MRS), managed Hadoop service, and Data Lake Insight (DLI), serverless Spark and Flink services, customers can transform or analyze data for business purpose and decide the direction of business precisely. Customers can also further utilize data by using them to develop AI model with ModelArts which is Huawei Cloud AI Platform. It is a one-stop development platform for AI developers which provides data preprocessing, semi-automated data labeling, distributed training, automated model building, and model deployment. This helps AI developers build models quickly and manage the lifecycle of AI development. For customers who do not have developer with experience in AI model development, ModelArts provides ExeML to process automate model design, parameter tuning and model training and deploy the model. The process is free of coding and does not require developers’ experience in AI model development. Especially Thailand, customers can use Thai ID Card Recognition and Thai Car Plate Recognition in SaaS model which will change image to text with no training required. These would accelerate the products and services development with AI equipped.

To provide great digital products and services, Day 2 operation is also important to ensure consistency of the products and services. Huawei Cloud provides services that would help customers to operate and maintain them efficiently such as Cloud Eye Services (CES), Application Operations Management (AOM), Application Performance Management (APM), etc. Customers can utilizes these tools to automatically response to the events such as scale out/in applications when massive users access to the applications on Huawei Cloud.

Security is very important on public cloud, Huawei Cloud provides plenty of security services to ensure customers’ that are using services would have the highest security on Huawei Cloud such as Stateful Firewall (Security Group and Network Access Control list), Web Application Firewall (WAF), Anti-DDOS, etc. For confidence of customers, Huawei Cloud has certified more than 80 + global certifications standard, including CSA-STAR, ISO27001, ISO27701, ISO27799, SOC1, SOC2, SOC3, PCI-DSS, PCI-3DS which are security certificates for financial, healthcare, especially ISO27701 which is privacy and information management certificate that would be suitable for Thailand Personal Data Protection Act (PDPA) that would be fully enforceable from 1 June 2022. 

As Huawei has wide coverage of products and services from 5G network, Public Cloud Services to consumer devices with strong ecosystem both in Thailand and other countries. During Covid-19, Huawei and partners have corporate together to provide Artificial Intelligence (AI) solutions and 5G technology to Siriraj Public Hospital, Ramathibodi Hospital and Bangkok Hospital in the fight against Covid-19. This can help doctors analyze computed tomography (CT) quantification results of infection cases with high accuracy over 97%.

To support digital economy in Thailand, not only provide Huawei Cloud services in Thailand, Huawei has multiple programs to enable ecosystem and business in Thailand such as Huawei ASEAN Academy provided more than 25,000+ global training services, Huawei Spark Ignite Thailand 2021 which is startup competition in Thailand, Student Hackaton Competition in Huawei Cloud and Connect.

With 22 Years of Business and Contribution Practices of Huawei in Thailand, Huawei Cloud is one of the key that will continuously provide quality services that would support Thailand become Digital Hub of ASEAN.