China Unicom Global is seeking to capture the cloud's full potential by updating its service.
The momentum behind cloud services is unstoppable as economies around the world undergo digital transformation. With the global market set to grow to a value of trillions of dollars in the coming years, operators, cloud players and data centre providers are seeking to capitalise on the huge opportunities that it promises.
One such operator is China Unicom Global. Seeing significant growth in its Cloud service year-on-year in the first nine months of this year, the operator is now further developing its service by adding new infrastructure. This includes cloud nodes around the world and backbone architecture to suit its customers’ computing and networking needs.
Unicom Cloud, which is available both in China and internationally after first being launched in 2013, has so far served more than 140 large enterprises, plus 70,000 small and medium ones. And the company has been taking steps in recent times to expand the potential offered by its cloud services. For one thing, it has been optimising the capabilities of its Tier-IV-ready Intelligent Cloud Data Center in the Tseung Kwan O area of Hong Kong that acts as a cloud-service convergence hub.
Aside from that, China Unicom Global has established a second Hong Kong data centre, in the Tsuen Wan area, to aid continuity of operations and risk resistance. Coming within a network of more than 60 international submarine and 20 terrestrial cable systems, those facilities are additionally connected to four major regional data centres in Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Germany. The company also cooperates with more than 40 cloud providers.
The company has backed all this up by completing the SDN transformation of its backbone infrastructure, creating a large-scale integrated computing and network ecosystem. With China Unicom Global having further rolled out four core data centres and 22 edge data centres worldwide, allowing it to provide smart cloud services closer to end users, the time is ripe for its Cloud service to expand.
“China Unicom Global is actively leveraging its rich experience in centralised operation of computing network resources to continue to improve Unicom Cloud,” says Meng Shusen, chair and chief executive at the company.
Secure and intelligent
The main aim with the Cloud service is to offer customers secure and trustworthy services with intelligent digital integration and customisation, while the infrastructure is also based on low-carbon, green data centres. “We integrate core capabilities such as cloud computing, big data, intelligence and security, and provide customers with one-stop delivery, customisation, and agile and efficient differentiated services,” says Meng.
The company has sought to build an open, inclusive and diversified cloud ecosystem, with Unicom Cloud providing an open API platform for connection and a hybrid cloud architecture that caters towards mainstream players and enables an efficient multi-cloud environment. All of the security products it offers over the service are self-developed and fully compatible with international software and hardware, and provide customers with reliable cloud connections.
Meanwhile, to meet the demand for AI, which has put higher computational pressure on data centres, China Unicom Global has also deployed distributed computing at edge nodes.
Taking a lead on innovative cloud services, Unicom Cloud provides more than 200 infrastructure-as-a-service and platform-as-a-service offerings, along with intelligent computing ability. It also offers dual cloud-engine technology, 400,000-plus cloud containers for online management and scheduling, and a hybrid cloud solution consisting of industry and private cloud.
Societal benefits
The Cloud service offers significant benefits for society in areas like digital government, education, finance and logistics. For instance, in education, there is high demand for end-to-end interaction, which needs a stable link with very low latency. With a view to helping enable that, the service offers close access to content-delivery-network edge nodes and interconnection between nodes.
Providing a range of functions that help underpin the digital transformation, China Unicom Cloud is ready to give customers what they need to move their business forward given current demands.
“The integrated computing and network services of Unicom Cloud are helping enterprises to accelerate their transformation,” says Meng. “We strengthen direct connections with major cloud providers to provide customers with high-quality and ecological products that are globally interoperable and multi-cloud interconnected.”
