Cloud

Huawei and cipherwave strike gold in the cloud

As an organisation focused on delivering services to its end-customers, CipherWave Business Solutions understands better than most that the more services people consume, and the more devices and technologies they utilise to facilitate that consumption, the more scalability and security challenges this creates.

01 October 2023

(Left) Justin Harris, Business Development Manager, Huawei South Africa, (Middle) Casper van der Walt, CTO, (Left) Justin Harris, Business Development Manager, Huawei South Africa, (Middle) Casper van der Walt, CTO, Cipherwave and (Right) Pragasen Kundon, Senior Manager: Huawei Cloud Solution Architecture, Huawei South Africa

According to Casper van der Walt, CTO at the company, due to the nature of the high levels of cloud services the company offers its end-customers, it required both improved scalability and security as the business began to expand. To meet these new demands, CipherWave sought out a cloud partner that could offer the same quality and levels of service as it provided its end-customers. “We chose to partner with Huawei Cloud South Africa, as this enabled us to close the loop in terms of consistent service, scalability and, of course, quality products. The beauty of working with Huawei is that their pricing is also very competitive, which makes it easier to scale our business to meet our clients’ growing demands,” he says.

“Since the cloud is absolutely critical for the solutions we now have, and will continue to offer moving forward, it should be obvious why we needed the security around this offering to be world-class, and is just one more reason we chose to partner with a world-class cloud provider.”

He explains that for CipherWave, compliance is very important, and that protecting data throughout the chain is crucial. Further outlining that trust and security are critical in terms of cloud operations. He notes that “we’re very comfortable with the local Huawei Cloud infrastructure provided as we have access and control of our environment. “

Importance of scalability

“I can’t speak for everyone, but from our perspective, we are able to engage quickly and easily with Huawei, and we’re able to control our own security, so we have absolutely no trust concerns with the company; our use of Huawei’s cloud is merely an extension of our own one.

“Furthermore, as a public and private cloud provider ourselves, CipherWave is able to recognise the importance of scalability, even as we note that it’s not always easy to scale rapidly. After all, it requires significantly more capital expenditure, in the form of infrastructure and hardware, to achieve such scalability.” Partnering with Huawei Cloud means that the company is able to scale at the rate its customers are demanding, he adds, and do so without having to make any capex investments.

“The cloud is growing at pace and accelerating rapidly. In today’s world, it’s simply impossible for a cloud provider of our size to scale and expand at this accelerated pace. This is why it’s imperative to partner with a hyperscaler like Huawei, as only such an operation has the economies of scale to make this feasible. “Moreover, the cloud is vital to South African organisations, as it offers them protection from, and the ability to mitigate the impact of, loadshedding. It also assists them to save money in a challenging economy, by reducing their capital expenditure. Most importantly, it enables them to make their businesses agile, thanks to its enormous scalability,” continues Van der Walt.

Risk-free partnership

He goes on to explain that while CipherWave obviously has its own support team and engineers, the partnership also gives it access to Huawei Cloud skills.

“Essentially, we are a customer-centric business, and our engineers are able to focus on providing support to our customers, because Huawei Cloud already supports the technology for us. In addition, the implementation by Huawei of automation programs and APIs helps to take further pressure off our engineers.”

Justin Harris, Senior Manager for Partner Development at Huawei Cloud SA, says that the company believes in offering partners like CipherWave a risk-free partnership.

To this end, he explains that Huawei fully funds proofs of concept, as well as partner training and certifi cation. In fact, this training is not only free, but the company actually incentivises partners to undertake it, in order to encourage more of their employees to access the necessary cloud skills.

“We are also renowned for the strong support we offer to our partners, across the board, rather than selectively like some hyperscalers. And it’s a variety of support types too, including partner support, pre-sales support, business development support, solutions architecture support, as well as training and marketing support, all of which are provided free of charge.

“CipherWave is a reputable local brand for us to go to market with, as the organisation is a strategic player in the cloud market and thus a strategic partner for Huawei. More than this, they are one of only a few partners in SA that have the requisite skills to be able to effi ciently use and understand public cloud, and thus leverage it to improve the IT environments of their own clients,” notes Harris. In conclusion, Van der Walt suggests that the partnership has plenty of scope for growth.

“Huawei Cloud is an integral part of CipherWave’s multicloud strategy and having a footprint of our own in Huawei Cloud’s environment ensures, we can support our customers.” As our business grows, so the partnership grows, and the fact that we receive support along the entire journey makes it even easier to grow our cloud. Having Huawei Cloud’s capability added to our own offering allows us to expand organically as we bring new customers on board, and, of course, as our cloud footprint grows, so does that of the Huawei Cloud,” he concludes.

Connect with HUAWEI CLOUD: www.huaweicloud.com/intl/en-us/

www.cipherwave.co.za